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CHRISTIANITY 
 
 MANKIND. 
 
 THEIR BEGINNINGS AND PROSPECTS, 
 
 BY / 
 
 CHRISTIAN CHARLES JOSIAS BUNSEN, 
 
 D.D., D.C.L., D.PH. 
 
 IN SEVEN VOLUMES. 
 SECOND VOLUME. 
 
 HISTORICAL SECTION. 
 
 HIPPOLYTUS AND HIS AGE; OR, THE BEGINNINGS AND PROSPECTS OF 
 
 CHRISTIANITY. 
 
 VOL. II. 
 
 THE LIFE OF THE CHRISTIANS OF THE APOSTOLICAL AGE. 
 
 LONDON: 
 LONGMAN, BROWN, GREEN, AND LONGMANS. 
 
 1854. 
 
^ 
 
 London : 
 
 A. and G. A. Spottisvvoods., 
 
 New-Btreet- Square. 
 
HIPPOLYTUS AND HIS AGE; 
 
 THE BEGINNINGS AND PROSPECTS 
 
 CHRISTIANITY. 
 
 BY 
 
 CHRISTIAN CHARLES JOSIAS BUNSEN, 
 
 D.D., D.C.L., D.PH. 
 
 SECOND EDITION. 
 IN TWO VOLUMES. 
 
 VOL. IL 
 
 THE LIFE OF THE CHRISTIANS OF THE APOSTOLICAL AGE. 
 
 LONDON: 
 LONGMAN, BROWN, GREEN, AND LONGMANS. 
 
 1854. 
 
London: 
 
 A. and G. A. Spottiswoode, 
 
 New-slreut-Square. 
 
TO 
 
 ^f)e iWnnorg 
 
 THOMAS ARNOLD. 
 
 A 2 
 
DO HAST MIT UNS GEKAMPFET DES GLAUBENS HEILGEN KAMPF, 
 FUR ALLE TIEF EMPFUNDEN DER BITTREN LEIDEN KRAMPF: 
 DU SAHST DER MENSCHHEIT NAHEN GERICHT UND BLUTGEN STREIT, 
 KLAR STAND VOR DEINEM AUGE DER JAMMER DIESER ZEIT. 
 
 DA TRAF DICH JENES SEHNEN DAS STILLT DER ERDE SCHMERZ, 
 ES LOSTE SICH IN LIEBE DAS MILDE STREITERHERZ, 
 BEGRiJSSTEST HELD ALS BOTEN GESANDT VON VATERHAND, 
 DEN ENGEL DER DICH FUHRTE INS EWGE HEIMATHLAND. 
 
 VERSTUMMT 1ST NUN AM GRABE DES ZORNS UND HASSES WUTH, 
 
 EIN LEUCHTTHURM RAGST DU STRAHLEND AUS NACHTGER STURMES FLUTH. 
 
 ES SPROSSET HEILGER SAMEN IN MANCHER JUNGEN BRUST, 
 
 EIN VOLK VOLL EDLEN STOLZES BLICKT AUF ZU DIR MIT LUST. 
 
 DU SELBST BIST WEGGERiiCKET AUS DER VERWIRRUNG NOTH, 
 DAS SCHWERSTE SEELENLEIDEN HAT DIR ERSPART DER TOD: 
 ES LIEGT VOR DIR ENTHULLET DAS RATHSEL DIESER WELT, 
 SCHAUST NUN WAS DU GEGLAUBET VON GOTTES LIGHT ERHELLT. 
 
 WIR ABER WOLLEN KAMPFEN WIE DU ES VORGETHAN, 
 IN HOFFNUNG UND IN LIEBE MIT GLAUBEN ANGETHAN, 
 DIE EWIGKEIT VOR AUGEN, WAHRHAFTIGKEIT IM SINN, 
 UND GEBEN FUR DIE WAHRHEIT DAS LEBEN WILLIG HIN. 
 
INTRODUCTION. 
 
 The First Volume gives the confession of Hippolytus, and his 
 portrait as one of the leading men of the first seven Christian 
 generations : the Second presents the picture of his Age, by 
 exhibiting the Book of the ancient Church and giving its inter- 
 pretation. The First Part presents the documents of early 
 Christianity, in which the common consciousness and the 
 Christian life of that age are authentically recorded. They are 
 the picture : their interpretation and application are attempted 
 in the Second Part. Such being its object, it, first of all, lays 
 before us the picture itself, in an explanatory form. It, secondly, 
 reflects in that picture the present time, connected with it 
 through the history of fifteen centuries. Lastly, it endeavours 
 to deduce from it a practical application for the reform of our 
 present state. Of the subjects which come thus under our con- 
 sideration, there is one which unites the two elements, the 
 community -life and theology — namely, the Liturgies of the 
 ancient Church. I have excluded from the general Text-Books 
 of ancient Christianity all liturgical formularies which contain 
 extraneous matter not common to all ancient Churches and 
 consequently to all the Liturgies transmitted to us. 
 
 The object of the First Part of the Picture is to restore the 
 authentic texts of the " Church- and House-Book of the early 
 Christians," and of the " Law-Book of the Ante-Nicene Church." 
 The first we exhibit rescued by our researches from the rub- 
 bish in which it was enveloped for centuries, and disencumbered 
 of the fraud and misunderstanding by which it was defaced. 
 The second, the Law-Book, we have been enabled to present in 
 its more original text, under the guidance of the Coptic Collec- 
 tion. They are both mere single leaves rescued from the flood 
 of time, the legacies of seven generations, who wrote, with their 
 
 A3 
 
VI INTRODUCTION. 
 
 own blood, the annals of the life of their hidden community, so 
 important to universal history. In spite of the fictitious form 
 which disguises their real contents, they exhibit the venerable 
 picture of that primitive age in a recognisable and intelligible 
 shape. They are essentially a childlike appendix to the New 
 Testament, and at the same time an independent test of its 
 truth, as being the fulfilment of what the Gospel promises. For 
 here we find, on the one hand, a continuation of the Ordinances 
 of the Apostles, as given in their canonical Epistles ; on the 
 other, the advice which the three great Apostles and the brother 
 of our Lord had communicated in their canonical writings, ap- 
 plied, in the Apostolic spirit, to the wants of the Church, and of 
 the human race renovated in that Church. These little insig- 
 nificant books, then, as a whole, represent nothing less than the 
 framework of the new world, which was to arise out of the spirit, 
 life, and death of Christ, and out of the exhortations of his 
 Apostles, that is to say, the world-renewing Christian Society, 
 or the Universal Church. The revelation given to us by Christ 
 has no other historical basis than in what the Bible records. 
 The actual historical proof, however, of the truth of the Biblical 
 revelation, lies only in the Church. The Church, again, is in 
 an eminent sense that primitive congregation, whose quiet and 
 exalted working in the first seven generations these leaves 
 authenticate. 
 
 The Church- and House-Book of the ancient Church, more 
 especially, is a book recording that Christian wisdom and piety 
 inspired by the Holy Ghost. It is a book composed by believ- 
 ing souls whose names are only known to God, and sealed with 
 the blood of the confessors of the faith. It exhibits a testimony 
 of faith in the moral government of the world, practically tried; 
 a testimony to the freedom of mind and to the indestructibility 
 of the dignity of man, against the tyranny of a Nero and the 
 administration of justice of a Trajan ; a light in the midst of 
 the darkness of despairing infidehty, and of a comfortless phi- 
 losophy among the educated classes. There is nothing which 
 makes this document more venerable than its divine simplicity 
 and childlikeness. Let no one open its leaves who does not 
 know how to value this simplicity. To him who will not read 
 
INTRODUCTION. VU 
 
 them, as the Bible must be read, with pure and respectful 
 feelings, they will only give offence and be injurious ; he will 
 only wrong, without in the least understanding them. 
 
 It is difficult to say whether tlie ordinances of the early 
 Christian age, which were attributed to the Apostles, are more 
 important from what they establish, or from their abstaining from 
 laying down rules and formularies upon other points. The 
 ordinances themselves are of great consequence, not merely to 
 those Churches which derive their doctrine and constitution 
 from the Apostolic Church, but likewise to those which feel a 
 vocation to frame, with Christian freedom, their own institutions 
 directly from the Sacred Records. Those ordinances show to 
 the old Churches, that their forms do not (as they assume) har- 
 monize with the spirit and letter of that age ; to the Reformed 
 Churches, that their articles and practices cannot be established 
 on the letter of the Bible alone, but that, if these practices are 
 based upon any truly ancient authority, they rest upon tradi- 
 tional primitive customs. For much which they have defended 
 for three centuries, as Biblical, is neither Biblical nor Apo- 
 stolical, except so far as the Christian freedom vvhich they have 
 exercised is truly evangelical. To Romanists, therefore, and 
 Protestants, these records preach temper and moderation ; and 
 to those among them who are willing to listen to their voice, 
 they proclaim reason and freedom. 
 
 They are, however, not less important for what, out of faith 
 in the operation of the Spirit in the Church, they leave to the 
 evangelical liberty, either of the special congregation or of the 
 individual. They prove, therefore, directly and indirectly, 
 that, without this emancipation from the letter, the restored 
 Church, which is that of the Future, can no more exist, than 
 it can without the spirit of that grand Christian view wliich is 
 reflected in these ordinances. 
 
 That no Church, no Christian society, corresponds exactly 
 with this picture of Apostolic reality, would, as a general 
 remark, prove nothing. For no age, however primitive, not 
 even that of the vVpostles themselves (the first century, or tlie 
 first two generations), is in its phenomena, its institutions, and 
 its forms, perfect, or suitable fur all times. That a form should 
 
 A 4 
 
Vai INTRODUCTION. 
 
 express the wants and suit the condition of its times is essential 
 to its perfection ; but this condition changes, and no age is with- 
 out its faults. What I mean here to say is this : that no his- 
 torical Church of the present day can be compared with that 
 Apostolic age, without manifold misconceptions of later times 
 becoming lamentably apparent in that light of truth and of 
 substantial reality. Between us and those Fathers, empty 
 phantoms have started up, darkening that primitive age : and, 
 wherever these dark phantoms are received as lights, they will 
 obscure the light of primitive antiquity, and falsify the life of 
 our own time. A severe trial, therefore, awaits any one who 
 looks primitive Christianity in the face. 
 
 The first effect is to engender perplexity, wavering, and doubt. 
 Men of less seridus minds, or persons brought up in slavery, 
 and not feeling the need of freedom, may be led by it to un- 
 belief, whether in the form of a total abandonment of Christianity 
 as the religion of the future, or in the form of a refuge in an 
 external infallibility which puts an end not only to all thought, 
 but also to all real belief. This is the state of men's minds in 
 the higher classes of society in Romanic countries ; and threatens 
 to become their state in the Established Church of half Ger- 
 manic, half Celto-Romanic England. 
 
 And yet, what clear-headed and honest inquirer, to whom 
 Christianity is a life, and its renovation the condition on which 
 all the hopes for the future of the European world are based, 
 has not felt, in our trying and almost Apocalyptic times, the 
 want of entering into communion of life with the spirit of pri- 
 mitive Christianity ? Who is there so infatuated by the canonized 
 forms of his own Church, as not to wish to behold, in all its 
 reality, her supposed model ? Or what reflecting Bible Chris- 
 tian is there, whose belief in the letter is so firm, that he can 
 venture to remain indifferent to hearing how those Apostolical 
 men understood that letter, and how they endeavoured to rea- 
 lize that message of salvation in doctrine and in worship, in 
 faith and in life? You take your stand upon the Church ; here 
 is its commencement. You take your stand upon the Bible; 
 here is its first Apostolical realization. What is required of 
 you is, not to substitute scholarship and research for simple 
 
INTRODUCTION. IX 
 
 Christian faith, much less to set up the idol of philosophy in 
 the shrine of religion. You have no longer to deal with the 
 abstract philosophy and barren research of the eighteenth cen- 
 tury ; you live in the nineteenth, one of historical philosophy and 
 of reconstruction. The v^^ork to which we are called is, un- 
 weariedly and humbly to sweep the porch of the Temple ; to 
 clear the floor ; not to riot as destructives in the darkened 
 chambers, but to bestir ourselves to restore and to allow the 
 light of Heaven to penetrate within them. It is the rubbish 
 of false learning and conventional scholasticism which separates 
 us from the Sanctuary, and it is high time to sweep it away, 
 as the signs of the latter days have appeared, in which infidel 
 superstition intends to usurp the altar, and wilful falsehood the 
 throne of truth. 
 
 Assuming, now, the result of such a conscientious examina- 
 tion of facts and documents to be what I have arrived at in 
 this and in the preceding Volume (and I am firmly convinced, 
 no thinker and investigator can arrive, upon the whole, at 
 a very different conclusion), the question arises: What is to 
 be done ? Shall we build ourselves a new house out of some 
 blocks of the Apostolic age, upon the ruins of the one in which 
 we were born and live? Or shall we, in the despair of un- 
 belief, and in the weakness of materialism (which is real ungod- 
 liness), refuse all research and all investigation into our Church 
 life and common constitution, in whatsoever shape ; and above 
 all, shall we refuse to lay a finger on the plague-spots, because 
 we might make the evil v;orse ? Is this not saying, in other 
 words, that Christianity is not true ? Or, since the ecclesiastical 
 foundations are everywhere gone or giving w^ay, shall we try to 
 strengthen them by outward forms, or, if need be, support them 
 by force, because the forms of religion are so closely connected 
 with state arrangements and outv/ard customs, and even, per- 
 haps, with influence and power, wealth and interest ? Or 
 shall we rake up all the arts of sophistry and false learning, 
 straining at gnats and swallowing camels, in order to persuade 
 people that all is right, although the form satisfies the conscience 
 no longer, and leaves the mind empty ? 
 
 Humanly speaking, the possibility of a peaceable and really 
 
X INTRODUCTION. 
 
 reconstructive European solution of this question, at the present 
 moment, depends on Germany and England, and, beyond the 
 Atlantic, on the giant scion of England, which practically de- 
 velopes, more and more, in an original manner peculiar to itself, 
 the germs of the Protestant life received from the mother country, 
 and attaches itself intellectually more strongly and inwardly 
 to Germany. And here we must not conceal from ourselves 
 a circumstance deserving of great consideration in reference to 
 England and Germany. As the German of the last hundred 
 years has far too little inclination for reality and life, so the 
 Englishman of the same period has too little propensity towards 
 research and knowledge. In the one case, the idea has great 
 difficulty in becoming reality ; in the other, the form is slow to 
 become a conscious idea. This is a sad, but incontrovertible 
 fact, which I feel myself compelled by internal conviction to 
 state. It is a matter important for the history of the world, 
 and threatens to become fatal ; for no real restoration can take 
 place without the union of those two elements. But there is 
 still time to do this. All, indeed, that is required at this instant, 
 in order to avert destruction, is merely to open the way to a 
 union of the leading minds in the two equally noble branches 
 of the Teutonic race, so that each may furnish the other, in 
 harmony with the feelings of the people and the times, with 
 the element in which it is deficient ; and, by combining Idea 
 with Reality, and Reality with Idea, may rescue and invigorate 
 the whole. In Germany, the tendency towards the Real is, 
 indeed, increasing, inasmuch as excessive indulgence in the 
 Ideal has produced only fancifulness and debility, and has re- 
 sulted in tearing the nation to pieces. In England, on the 
 other hand, the want of research and thought, and the desire 
 for intellectual freedom, make themselves felt jnore and more, 
 and not the least so, indeed, in those who have passed through 
 the school of medieval forms and the enchanted garden of Ro- 
 manism. The Germans feel that infidelity and slavery follow 
 in the wake of the idolization of science; the English, that the 
 Christian life is not assured without knowledge and inward con- 
 viction, and that the Jesuits lurk behind the superstitious at- 
 tachment to the middle ages. Generally, however, a vast move- 
 
INTRODUCTION. XI 
 
 ment, both spiritual and political, even social, indeed, is agitating 
 men's minds, and the nations are convinced that they cannot be 
 free without the Gospel, and that they will neither be able to 
 obtain or retain the Gospel without political liberty. 
 
 While, then, we exclude from our counsels all such sugges- 
 tions of despair, as being equally unworthy of a man and of a 
 Christian, we establish two safe principles. The first is, that, 
 in all congregational and ecclesiastical institutions, Christian 
 freedom, within limits conformable to Scripture, constitutes the 
 first requisite for a vital restoration. The second fundamental 
 principle is, that every Church must hold fast what she already 
 possesses, in so far as it presents itself to her consciousness as 
 true and efficacious. In virtue of the first condition, she will 
 combine Reason and Scripture in due proportions : by virtue 
 of the second, she wall distinguish between Spirit and Letter, 
 between Idea and Form. No external clerical forms and me- 
 dieval reflexes of bygone social and intellectual conditions can 
 save us, nor can sectarian schisms and isolation from national 
 life. Neither can learned speculations, and still less the in- 
 comparably more arrogant dreams of the unlearned. Scientific 
 consciousness must dive into real life, and refresh itself in the 
 feelings of the people, and that no one will be able to do with- 
 out having made himself thoroughly conversant with the suffer- 
 ings and the sorrows of the lowest classes of society. For out 
 of the feeling of these sufferings and sorrows, as being to a great 
 degree the most extensive and most deep-seated product of evil, 
 that is, of selfishness, arose, eighteen hundred years ago, the 
 divine birth of Christianity. The new birth, however, requires 
 new pangs of labour, and not only on the part of individuals, 
 but of the whole nation, in so far as she bears within her the 
 germs of future life, and possesses the strength to bring forth. 
 Every nation must set about the work herself, not indeed as 
 lier own especial exclusive concern, but as the interest of all 
 mankind. Every people has the vocation to coin for itself the 
 divine form of Humanity, in the Church as well as in the State ; 
 its life depends upon this being done, not its reputation merely ; 
 it is the condition of existence, not merely of prosperity. 
 
 Is it not time, in truth, to withdraw the veil from our misery ? 
 
Xll INTRODUCTION. 
 
 to point to the clouds which rise from all quarters, to the 
 noxious vapours which have already well nigh suffocated us ? 
 to tear off the mask from hypocrisy, and destroy that sham 
 which is undermining all real ground beneath our feet ? to point 
 out the dangers which surround, nay, threaten already to engulf 
 us? Is the state of things satisfactory in a Christian sense, 
 where so much that is unchristian predominates, and where 
 Christianity has scarcely begun here and there to penetrate the 
 surface of the common life ? Shall we be satisfied, with the 
 increased outward respect paid to Christianity and the Church ? 
 Shall we take it as a sign of renewed life, that the names of 
 Grod and Christ have become the fashion, and are used as a 
 party badge ? Can a society be said to be in a healthy con- 
 dition, in which material and selfish interests in individuals, as 
 well as in the masses, gain every day more and more the upper- 
 hand ? in which so many thinking and educated men are 
 attached to Christianity only by outward forms, maintained 
 either by despotic power, or by a not less despotic, half-super- 
 stitious, half-hypocritical custom? When so many churches 
 are empty and satisfy but few, or display more and more 
 outward ceremonials and vicarious rites ? When a godless 
 schism has sprung up between spirit and form, or has even been 
 preached up as a means of rescue ? When gross ignorance or 
 confused knowledge, cold indifference or the fanaticism of 
 superstition, prevail as to the understanding of H0I3' Scripture, 
 as to the history, nay, the fundamental ideas of Christianity ? 
 W^lien force invokes religion in order to command, and dema- 
 gogues appeal to the religious element in order to destroy ? 
 When, after all their severe chastisements and bloody lessons, 
 most statesmen base their wisdom only on the contempt of 
 mankind ; and when the prophets of the people preach a liberty, 
 the basis of which is selfishness, the object libertinism, and the 
 wages are vice ? And this in an age the events of which show 
 more and more fatal symptoms, and in which a cry of ardent 
 longing pervades the people, reechoed by a tliousand voices ! 
 
 Let us gaze, then, with the earnestness which this view of 
 the state of the world demands, on the mirror which the Church- 
 and House-Book of the Apostolic age holds up to us. 
 
INTRODUCTION. XIU 
 
 This mirror shows us, in the Second Part of the present 
 Volume, four pictures. We see in it the Christian school and 
 the Christian congregation. Christian worship and Christian 
 life ; four simple childlike pictures, which nevertheless represent 
 the foreshadowing and model of almost everything great, noble, 
 and hallowing, which has sprung up, in renewed youth and 
 beauty, out of the tomb of the old world and renovated the face 
 of the earth. 
 
 There is but one element wanting to make this picture 
 complete ; the" Christian knowledge and philosophy possessed 
 by the ancient Church. The Apology of Hippolytus is prin- 
 cipally designed to fill up this gap: it has been clothed in the 
 garb of fiction, as being the most suitable, for reasons already 
 given in the Preface to the First Volume. 
 
 By the side of that domestic and congregational life of the 
 ancient Christians, which from the very foundation of social 
 life prepares the new world, a deep mental development, the 
 prefiguration of a new philosophy, pervades the primitive 
 Church, without a representation of which the picture of that 
 age not only would remain incomplete, but in its most essential 
 portions unintelligible. 
 
 The original impulse of this mental development lies in the 
 life and declarations of Christ in regard to Himself and His 
 relation with the Father and the Brethren, and in the doctrine 
 of such a communion of the children of God as must convert 
 the dominion of selfishness, of self-will, and of tyranny, into a 
 kingdom of God, into a kingdom of love and truth, of inward 
 law and intellectual freedom. Father, Son, Spirit, and God, 
 Man, Mankind, these are the centres of a system of speculation 
 intimately connected with a deep ethic earnestness, and with a 
 world-renewing instinct of association. The germ of the his- 
 torical development of this Divine doctrine and this Divine life 
 bursts forth with vital power in the Apostolic writings and his- 
 tories, and unfolds itself in forms aspiring to universality in the 
 Greek and Roman world ; inasmuch as it endeavours to combine 
 the wisdom and learning of that world with the sacred records 
 and the life of the Christians. 
 
 Such was the commencement of that great spiritual drama, 
 
XiV INTRODUCTION. 
 
 the elements, complications, and solutions of which I have 
 attempted to exhibit, partly philosophically, partly historically, 
 in the philosophical key to this work. By the side of a depth of 
 speculative thought striving after truth and knowledge stood a 
 moral power of mind which was maintained through life and in 
 death ; a seriousness of character which was rooted in the feeling 
 of the horror of sin on the one hand, and in the belief in salva- 
 tion and the Divine providential order of an eternal fatherly 
 Love on the other. This combination forms the main strength 
 of ancient Christianity, and constitutes the highest historical 
 significance of its philosophic development of Thought. Its 
 vs^eak side is the unsuccessful attempt to unite the philosophical 
 and historical elements, the Idea and the Fact. But in the 
 midst of the tragic complication which necessarily ensues from 
 this antagonism, two saving elements manifest themselves : the 
 Christian Truth which forms the basis of the system, and the 
 Truthfulness which is reflected in the life of the Church, as it 
 appears in the Chuich- and House-Book. Scripture and 
 practical Church life regulate and support the scientific con- 
 sciousness of Apostolic Christianity; and, by both, what is 
 obscure in speculation is cleared up, and what is imperfect 
 in knowledge supplied. Even the unhistorical, half-rabbinical, 
 half-Neo- Platonic system of interpretation (or rather misinter- 
 pretation) is so far corrected by these two elements, that, in the 
 main points, the original truth is not lost, but only obscured 
 and distorted. 
 
 Shortly after the time of Hippolytus that speculative tone of 
 thought forced itself from the school into the congregation. With 
 the introduction of Christianity into the Roman empire as a 
 State-religion, the metaphysical formulas of the majority of the 
 bishops took the place of the very inmost consciousness and life 
 of Christendom, and claimed submission as the symbols and 
 conditions of union with Christ and his Church. When thus 
 the superior clergy had obtained spiritual supremacy in the 
 world, two fresh races of men appeared on the stage of the 
 Roman world. The Germanic race embraced Christianity 
 under the form of the Roman Church as State-religion : and 
 afterwards, the Slavonic tribes, when they had become impregnated 
 
INTRODUCTION. XV 
 
 with Germanic life, adopted Christianity under the Byzantine 
 form of worship. While these are, even at the present moment, 
 still in the background of national development, tlie Germanic 
 nations, as Romanic and as pure Germanic, for a thousand 
 yeai's have borne the torch of the spirit : the former rather 
 systematizing what had been delivered to them, the latter rather 
 breaking through conventionality in order to penetrate to the 
 free light of the independent spirit. Three centuries before 
 the Romanic nations were driven to shake off by revolution aii 
 intolerable yoke of double tyranny, the Germanic strove by 
 ecclesiastical reforms to restore the equilibrium between theology 
 and life, not breaking with the past, but making its idea 
 fructify the present, and thus securing a future truly imbued 
 with Gospel principles. Whatever of real political liberty and 
 of hope exists in the world is the fruit of that reform. 
 
 In the meantime, the contrasts which have been exhibited 
 are so vast, that at the first glance Hippolytus and his contem- 
 poraries might seem to us unintelligible, and in some points 
 ridiculous ; and we certainly, with our state of things, should 
 appear to them incomprehensible, and with our conventionalism 
 very absurd, could they express an opinion upon us. 
 
 To bring out the internal connection between the Christian 
 views and theological ideas of the ancient Church, as contrasted 
 with our own times and our state, is the design of that fiction 
 with which the Third Part of this Volume opens — the Apology 
 of Hippolytus. The Appendix with which the Volume closes 
 contains some Essays which refer less to Hippolytus personally 
 than to the general aspirations of the Age, both in Worship and 
 in Constitution. 
 
 May the contributions oflTered in these two Volumes to the 
 better appreciation of a personal character which demands vene- 
 ration, and of an age sinking indeed, but noble in its aspi- 
 rations, and of high historical import, not be considered useless, 
 nor at the same time fail in furnishing a mite of consolation 
 and instruction for the sufferings of the present day, and a ray 
 of light for the hopes of the future ! 
 
XVI INTRODUCTION. 
 
 As to the special philosophical and historical results obtained 
 by the researches of these reconstructive Volumes, I shall 
 endeavour to point them out for the general reader in the fol- 
 lowing concluding words. 
 
 I have made, in the Text-Book itself, or in the Book of the 
 Church, for the first time, a complete collection of all that is 
 genuine in the so-called Apostolical Ordinances, as well as of 
 all the creeds, general liturgical forms, psalms, and hymns of the 
 first three centuries (omitting only the canticles which occur in 
 the canonical writings of the New Testament), referring for the 
 Greek texts, Constitutions, &c., to the Liturgical Volumes of 
 the Analecta. In like manner I have, for the first time, elu- 
 cidated the origin, with some success I trust, and shown the 
 gradual extension and interpolation, of the records of the earliest 
 ecclesiastical law, called the Apostolic Canon. Whatever is 
 excluded from this collection is not genuine. Every Christian 
 reader is now enabled to judge for himself of the value of 
 certain opinions respecting the ancient Church : the critical scho- 
 lar will find in the Analecta that what is here presented to the 
 public in a popular form is based upon solid critical research. 
 
 For the application of the picture of the ancient Church, I 
 have given a documentary view of the history and idea of the 
 Christian sacrifice and Eucharistic service, according to the 
 different epochs of the Liturgy of the Episcopal Churches of 
 England, Scotland, and the United States. The whole inter- 
 pretation is destined to make that portrait of the ancient Church 
 available to ourselves, and to hold it up as a mirror to our own 
 age. For this purpose I have therefore exposed the contrasts 
 which the Medieval, and in part the Protestant, Churches 
 exhibit to that of the Apostolic age, and I have appealed to the 
 Sacred Records as the Code, and to Christian conscience as 
 the judge. I have also reverently intimated on what basis a 
 national and catholic restoration might be founded, and an 
 organic development be prepared, of those elements of Christian 
 constitution and worship and of the whole Christian life which 
 the primitive Church exhibits to us. 
 
 There is no one of the practical questions of the day, either 
 as regards the Church or our social relations, in so far as they are 
 
INTRODUCTION. XVll 
 
 influenced by Christianity, that I have not taken into consider- 
 ation, and discussed in a spirit of moderation, but with uncom- 
 promising honesty and unreserved frankness. 
 
 Two great and stirring (or, as our French neighbours say, 
 burning) questions, which for want of time I had been obliged 
 to pass over at the close of my picture, and reflex of the social 
 relations, the Protestant law of divorce, and the slavery in the 
 United States of America, I have not failed to treat in the 
 same spirit in this new edition. 
 
 On all these points I am prepared for misconstructions, con- 
 tradictions, and attacks, from opposite quarters. Any author 
 who in our times treats theological and ecclesiastical subjects 
 frankly, and therefore with reference to the problems of the age, 
 must expect to be ignored, and, if that cannot be done, abused 
 and reviled. I shall, however, only notice such opponents as 
 will discuss a sacred subject with an impartial love of truth, and 
 who show themselves men of independent thought and of cri- 
 tical research. I shall quietly leave the others to their prejudices, 
 and by silence reply to such as enter into a philosophical dis- 
 cussion with the old cry, *' Great is Diana of the Ephesians ! " 
 It is impossible, in our times, to have an independent opinion 
 on those subjects, without critical study and calm deliberate 
 consideration ; and yet everybody thinks him.self entitled to pro- 
 nounce judgment upon them. But the time will come when 
 they will be again made the objects of universal interest and 
 popular research. All tends to that, in Germany from the 
 philosophical, in England from the practical, point of view ; and, 
 in both, from a feeling of a great inward and outward necessity. 
 Then it will be seen whether or not the way that I have indi- 
 cated is the right one. Personally, it is perfectly indifferent to 
 me whether I live to see this or not. I have neither written 
 for my own personal gratification, nor for any party, either here 
 or in Germany, nor for any fashion of the day. I have medi- 
 tated and inquired from an earnest desire to discover truth, and 
 to meet the wants of a confused and eventful age, which yearns 
 after light and information ; and I have said nothing which I 
 have not thoroughly examined and tested for at least twenty- 
 five years. Thus, while I shall not be scared by any dictatorial 
 VOL. II. a 
 
XVIU INTRODUCTION. 
 
 assertions, neither will any correction come unwelcome to me. Of 
 the truth of the fundamental views which I have expressed, both 
 here and throughout the work, and of the soundness of their 
 philosophical and historical groundwork, I have as little doubt 
 as I have of my own existence. 
 
 Tliis applies, in particular, to my conviction that the question 
 at this moment is not how to carry out, but how to prepare, a 
 second, grand, reconstructive Reformation. The porch of the 
 Temple must first be more thoroughly cleansed than it was in 
 the sixteenth, and, above all, restored more honestly than it was 
 in the seventeenth, century ; and, lastly, the work must be 
 handled more practically than has yet been done by the critical 
 German school of this age. In the meantime, let every one 
 cleanse his own heart and house as well as he can. When the 
 feeling of the misery which is coming, and a real faith in the 
 saving truth which is in Christ, shall have thoroughly penetrated 
 the nations, then will the Spirit of God assuredly come upon 
 them with might, eitb.er for the reformation or the aimihilation 
 of the existing Churches. Whether this crisis will end in the 
 renewal or in the destruction of the present nations and states, 
 will depend upon the position they take in face of the demands 
 of the Gospel, and the wants of the times. For every nation 
 and age has its time and its day of visitation, after which its fate 
 is sealed. This great movement, however, will assuredly not 
 lead to the destruction of Christianity, but to its establishment 
 on a firmer basis ; not to the lowering of the person of Jesus of 
 Nazareth, but to his greater glorification : and God's kingdom 
 of Truth and Liberty on earth will advance as triumphantly 
 over the perishing as over the renovated kingdoms and states of 
 the present world. 
 
 My belief in this future rests upon the following convictions, 
 which have been considerably strengthened by, and seem to me 
 naturally to flow from, the criticism of the work of Hippolytus 
 and of his age ; and which I consider as the final result of the 
 comparison between ancient and modern Christianity and di- 
 vinity founded upon that criticism. 
 
 Christianity is true, because free : and it is free and freeing 
 because true. Christianity is philosophically and historically 
 
INTRODUCTION. XIX. 
 
 true ; and it could not be true, except by being so both by its 
 thought and by its history. It is true, by the inexhaustible 
 truth of the eternal thought which it manifests, and by the 
 equally inexhaustible truth of the divine individuality upon 
 which it rests, Jesus of Nazareth. It is true, by the genuine- 
 ness and historical truth of the apostolical, and evangelical, ac- 
 counts, which we possess of this exalted individuality, and by the 
 harmony of these records with the living tradition which accom- 
 panies it. This tradition is the Church, and the Church is 
 christianized humanity; christianized by the Spirit of Christ, 
 and by the Scripture which that Spirit produced. 
 
 The great proof of the divine nature and truth of Christianity 
 is, its power of regenerating the world. 
 
 This regenerating power has shown itself twice, in an un- 
 paralleled world-renovating change produced by the spirit of 
 Christianity : in the moral and intellectual revival of the ancient 
 world, after the downfal of the universal empire of Rome in the 
 fifth Christian century ; and by the moral, intellectual, and 
 political revival of the modern world, after the downfal of the 
 omnipotence of papal Rome in the sixteenth. 
 
 Whatever there exists of great, of hopeful, of redeeming, in 
 the present state of the human race, is the effect of Christ and 
 Christianity. This is the true, progressive, and comforting 
 fulfilment of all prophecies of Christ himself, and of His Apos- 
 tles ; and of all those prophetic words and deeds of the ancient 
 world (principally, not exclusively, of the Jewish) which speak 
 of a reign of truth and justice upon this earth. 
 
 The nations of Christendom, whether of the Greek and 
 Roman, or of the national, that is to say, Protestant, commu- 
 nions, may live, and ought to live, by the side of each other in 
 charity and peace: but they can only do so by virtue of the 
 great principle of the Reformation of the sixteenth century, 
 and of the free political constitutions it has produced and is 
 producing. For that great principle is the moral self-responsi- 
 bility of each individual, founded upon personal faith in Christ 
 and in His Spirit, reflected as both are by the conscience of the 
 human breast, and by the reason of the human mind. This 
 faith produces necessarily self-responsibility ; self-responsibility 
 
 a 3 
 
XX INTRODUCTION. 
 
 produces, and virtually is, self-government: self-government 
 renders possible, and works, political liberty ; and this political 
 liberty is the only safeguard, as much as it is itself the fruit, 
 of religious liberty. Both liberties together render material 
 toleration possible without indifference, and prepare the age 
 in which divine charity is to rule paramount over the world. 
 Whoever idolizes the letter of Byzantine Christianity, and 
 the system of medieval Divinity, breaks with the Church of 
 the Apostles; he forfeits the Spirit of Christ, and falls out 
 of that very communion with the ancient believers which he 
 pretends to cherish. Whoever will attempt, whether out of 
 fanaticism, or (which is more likely to be the case, and more 
 condemnable) for political ends, to replace those systems upon 
 the throne of the world, breaks with the present and with the 
 future : and whoever seeks for the conservative element in the 
 restoration of sacerdotal dominion over the conscience, and of 
 priest-rule over national government, prepares not only great 
 political revolutions, but also the entire downfal of the hierarchy 
 itself. Those who have sown superstition have reaped, and are 
 reaping, unbelief; as those who have sown despotism have reaped, 
 and are reaping, anarchy. But those who will do so now, 
 or in any time to come, will bring upon themselves, and, as far 
 as in them lies, upon the world, a much greater convulsion and 
 destruction than ever were witnessed since the downfal of the 
 Roman empire. 
 
 To the Picture of the Life of the Ancient Christians and its 
 interpretation, I have added as an Appendix those of the Essays 
 of the Second Volume of my First Edition, which refer less to 
 Hippolytus personally, than to his Age. They treat partly of 
 the Christian sacrifice, partly of the so-called Constitutions and 
 Canons of the Apostles. 
 
 I have, in conclusion, to add a word respecting the English 
 style of the Text-Books of the ancient Church. I have ad- 
 hered throughout to the translations of Whiston and Tattam, 
 except where the text rendered correction indispensable, and 
 
INTRODUCTION. XXI 
 
 furnished the materials for making it. But, as already re- 
 marked, the Coptic text is in many places so unintelligible, 
 that nobody, without fresh critical study, can possibly make 
 a thoroughly satisfactory translation of it. I have accordingly 
 left Tattam's version, on the whole, as it was ; although its 
 defects have not escaped my notice. Let any one who is not 
 satisfied with it give us a better text. Some obscure passages 
 I have been enabled to explain in the Appendix to the Text- 
 Book, by means of a Greek text recently discovered. 
 
 The interpretation of the Text-Books, with the exception 
 of the Notes, was originally written in German. It has been 
 put into English by my valued friend Mr. Cottrell, the trans- 
 lator of the First Volume of my "Egypt;" but, in finally re- 
 vising it, I have here and there made such additions and alter- 
 ations as I thought would render my ideas more intelligible to 
 the English reader. 
 
 London, April 22. 1852, 
 
 a 3 
 
ANALYTICAL TABLE 
 
 CONTENTS OF THE SECOND VOLUME. 
 
 r.ge 
 
 Introductioh --------V 
 
 FIRST PART. 
 
 THE TEXT-BOOKS OF THE ANCIENT CHURCH. 
 
 The Church and House-Book of the Ancient Christians, 
 
 First Book : The Reception, the Instruction, the Pledge, and the 
 Admission of the Catechiunens : or the Christian Instruction and 
 the Baptism ot" the early Church - - - _ 5 
 
 Appendix : 
 
 I. Different Forms of the Creed : 
 
 1, According to the Church of Rome - - ■• - 21 
 
 2. According to the Seventh Book of the Greek Constitutions 
 
 (doubtful) - - - - - - 22 
 
 II. An Ordinance that the Baptized is to say aloud the Lord's 
 
 Prayer, as Priest before the People - - - - 23 
 
 III. The Order of Baptism in the Chui-ch of Jerusalem - - 24 
 
 Second Book : The Constitution of the early Church : 
 
 A. The First Set of Ordinances of the Church of Alexandria 
 
 respecting the Clergy - - - - - - 27 
 
 B. The Second Set .-.-.. 32 
 
 C. The Third Set - - - - - -^ . 37 
 
 Appendix : 
 
 A. The Requisites and Duties of a Bishop, according to the Third 
 
 Book of the Greek Constitutions - - - - 42 
 
 B. On the Marriage of the Clergy - - - - 43 
 
 a 4 
 
XXIV ANALYTICAL TABLE OF CONTENTS. 
 
 Page 
 
 Third Book : The Order and Formularies of the Service, or the 
 Christian Sacrifice and Worship of the Ancient Church : 
 
 A. The Liturgy, or the General Order of the Service - - 47 
 
 B. The recorded early Hymns and Forms of Thanksgiving : 
 
 I. The Morning Hymn, or Hymn of Thanksgiving : 
 
 1. According to the Codex Alexandrinus - - - 50 
 
 2. The same reduced to its primitive Form - - - 50 
 n. The Morning Verse between Psalm Verses - - - 51 
 
 III. The Evening Psalm, composed of Psalm Verses - - 51 
 
 IV. The Evening Hymn of the Greek Christians - - 52 
 
 V. The Evening Hymn of the Apostolic Constitutions - - 52 
 
 Appendix from the Seventh Book of the Greek Constitutions: 
 Liturgical formularies : 
 I. A Form of Thanksgiving before the Communion - - 53 
 
 II. A Form of Thanksgiving after the Communion - - 53 
 
 Fourth Book : Rules of general Conduct for all Members of the Con- 
 gregation ; or the Congregational, Social, and Domestic Life of 
 the early Christians : 
 First Chapter: Regulations of Christian Life respecting the 
 Worship and Service (from the Seventh Book of the Greek 
 Constitutions) - - - - - - 57 
 
 Second Chapter : Rules of Christian Conduct in the Love Feast and 
 
 other social Meetings, and in Domestic Life - - - 60 
 
 Appendix (from the Sixth Book of the Greek Constitutions) : on 
 
 Conjugal Life and on Impurities - - - - 72 
 
 The Law-Book of the Ante-Nicene Chukch. 
 
 Critical Table of the Canons of both Collections - - - 75 
 
 The Ecclesiastical Canons of the Apostles - - - - 79 
 
 Notes to the Church and House-Book of the Ancient Christians. 
 
 To the First Book : 
 
 Introductory Note on the critical Works respecting the Ordinances 
 
 of Baptism - - - - - - -91 
 
 Note A. On Chrysostom's Record of the Ancient Order of Baptism 
 
 In the Church of Antioch - - - - - 92 
 
 Note B. On the Creed of the Apostles : 
 
 Introduction - - - - - - -92 
 
ANALYTICAL *TABLE OF CONTENTS. XXV 
 
 Page 
 
 I. The Creed of the Church of Rome - - - 95 
 
 IT. The Creed of the Church of Alexandria - - - 96 
 III. The Apostles' Creed, according to the Seventh Book of the 
 
 Greek Constitutions - - - - 97 
 
 To the Third Book : 
 
 Note C. The original Text of the Psalms and Hymns of the 
 Apostolical Church : 
 
 Critical Introduction - - - - • - 98 
 
 SECOND PART. 
 
 THE INTERPRETATION AND APPLICATION. 
 
 BOOK I. 
 The Christian School and the Baptismal Vow. 
 
 I. The Picture, 
 
 Introductory Remarks : Baptism a Pledge - - - - 105 
 
 I. The previous Examination - - - - - 106 
 
 II. The Christian Instruction - - - - . 108 
 
 III. The Examination - - - - - -109 
 
 IV. The Baptismal Pledge, and the immediate Preparation for it - 110 
 
 V. The Admission • - - - - - -112 
 
 Concluding Remarks : Origin and History of Pedo-Baptism, and of 
 
 the Scholastic Doctrine of Baptismal Regeneration ; Origen, 
 TertuUian, and Cyprian - - - - - -113 
 
 II. The Churches of the present Day reflected in this Picture. 
 
 The Demonism and Formalism of the ancient World, and the Senti- 
 
 mentalism and Amorphism of our Age - - - - 118 
 
 The Reality of the Apostolic Age and the Conventionality of the later 
 
 Church - - - - - - - -119 
 
 The Eastern Church ------- 120 
 
 The Latin Church - - - - - - - 121 
 
 The Reformers and the Reformed Churches - - - - 121 
 
 III. The Moral Application to the Church of the Future. 
 
 Outlines of the Principles of the Reform of Baptism - •• - 125 
 
 Proposals for a practical Reform - - - - - 126 
 
 The Confirmation of the German Church ... - 127 
 
XXVI ANALYTICAL TABLE OF CONTENTS. 
 
 BOOK 11. 
 The Constitution and Government of the Christian Church. 
 
 I. The Picture. 
 
 Page 
 
 Christianity originally a free and a secret Society, like that of the Jews 
 
 in Egypt - - - - - - - 129 
 
 Christianity a destructive and a regenerating Element - - 130 
 Every Town Congregation a Church and a Bishopric - - - 1 3 1 
 The Bishop and the Body of Elders : Origin of Episcopate - - 131 
 The Town and its Villages, or the first collective Congregation - 132 
 The Metropolis and smaller Towns around it, second Formations - 132 
 The principal Town and the Province or Provinces connected with it 133 
 The organic Life of the Congregation stops short at the first Form- 
 ation : the larger Unions are merely clerical, and why - - 133 
 The Relation of the ancient Church to the State _ - - 135 
 No "Character indelebilis" of Clergy, and no Celibacy - - 137 
 The Diaconate : Deacons and Deaconesses - - - - 137 
 
 The Alms, and the Tithes and First-Fruits - - - - 138 
 
 II. The Reflex. 
 
 The Greek and the Roman Churches, each a Corporation of governing 
 
 Clergy -------- 139 
 
 The Difference between them - - - - - 140 
 
 The Principle of National Liberty and Independence claimed by the 
 
 Reformers - - - - - - -140 
 
 The constitutional Formations in the Protestant Churches of the Con- 
 tinent -------- 141 
 
 The English Church and the Dissenters - - - - 142 
 
 The Scotch Church - - - - - - - 142 
 
 The American Formula of the Independence of the Church and State, 
 
 and the History of this Relation - - - - - 145 
 
 Supremacy a spiritual Dictatorship for National Independence in 
 
 Church Afiairs - - - - - - -146 
 
 General Formula of the Result - - - _ _ 146 
 
 III. The Practical ApplicatioJi. 
 
 The Principle of the renewed Episcopate with Synods : Idea of the 
 
 Union ------__ 143 
 
 The Catholic Element, or the Principles of Universality - - 149 
 
 The Cooperation for Missionary Purposes - - - . 149 
 
 Untenable Notions of the later Canon Law respecting Ordination and 
 
 Consecration - - - - - - -150 
 
ANALYTICAL TABLE OL' CONTENTS. XXVll 
 
 BOOK III. 
 The CiiKisTiAN Sacrifice and the Liturgy and Order of Service. 
 
 I. The Picture. 
 
 Page 
 
 The organic Nature and Dispositions of the Service - . - 153 
 
 The Christian Hymns .---_. jgg 
 
 The Offering of the Gifts, or the Symbolical Sacrifice - - 156 
 
 The real, the spiritual Sacrifice, and its double liturgical Expression - 158 
 The present Form of the Lord's Prayer is the ancient Prayer of Con e- 
 
 cration, or the Prayer over Givers and Gifts - • - 160 
 
 Invocation and Lord's Prayer always said, and before the Communion 162 
 The Element of Tlianksgiving and that of Invocation, as the Object of 
 
 the free Prayer of Consecration ----- 152 
 The Eucharistic Prayer included a Commemoration of the Dead, of 
 
 which the principal Element was that of Thanks - - 164 
 
 IL The Reflex. 
 
 I. The Reflex of the Worship of the Eastern Church in the Mirror of 
 
 the Apostolic Age - - - - - -166 
 
 The Traces of the Development of the Eucharistic Church Prayers 
 out of the Lord's Prayer and the free Prayer of Consecration - 167 
 
 II. The Reflex of the Communion Service of the Gauls of Spain, 
 
 of Milan, and of Africa - - - - - -169 
 
 in. The Reflex of the Communion Service of the Church of Rome - 170 
 
 IV. The general Character of the Communion Services of the present 
 Byzantine and Roman Churches - - - - . 171 
 
 V. The Service of the Reformed Churches - - _ . J73 
 Recapitulation of the Reflex of the Byzantine and Roman Eucharistic 
 
 Service - - - - - - - -173 
 
 The Reflex of the Reform of the Service in the Church of England in 
 
 general - - - - - - - -174 
 
 1. The First Communion Book of Edward the Sixth - - 181 
 
 2. The Second Book of Edward the Sixth ... igg 
 
 3. Laud's Communion Service for Scotland - - - 187 
 
 4. The present established Communion Service of the Church of 
 
 England (1559, 1604, 1662) - - - - - 190 
 
 5. The present Communion Service of the Episcopal Church of 
 
 Scotland - - - - - - - 194 
 
 6. The Liturgy, and, in particular, the Communion Service, of the 
 
 Episcopal Church of the United States - - - 197 
 
 Summary of the results of the Protestant Measures for amending the 
 
 Liturgy, and restoring the Christian Sacrifice - - - 199 
 
XXVIU ANALYTICAL TABLE OF CONTENTS. 
 
 III. The P7-actical Application. 
 
 Page 
 
 The Fallacy and Danger of the Attempt to transfer Forms of the Greek 
 and Latin Church authoritatively to our own Use, exemplified by 
 the Collects, the Prophetic Lessons, and the Ecclesiastical Year - 205 
 Principles for right Use of Ancient Elements _ . - 208 
 
 The Psalmody, and the distinguishing Excellences of the English 
 
 Liturgy -------- 209 
 
 The Excellence of the German Church as to Hymns and Hymnody - 210 
 The Principles of Sacred and Church Music - - - - 211 
 
 The Principles of Church Architecture - - - - 211 
 
 The leading Principle : the Eestoration of the Scriptural Self- 
 
 Sacrifice ..._-_- 212 
 
 IV. The Picture and Import of the other Ceremonies of the Ancient Church. 
 Marriage and Burial Service - - - - - 214 
 
 BOOK IV. 
 
 The Rules of Christian Life in the Congregational, Social, and 
 Domestic Relations. 
 
 The Congregational Life ----.. 217 
 
 The Origin of Fast-Days - - - - - -218 
 
 The Observation of Sabbath and Sunday - - - - 218 
 
 The Love-Feasts - - - - - - -219 
 
 The Sign of the Cross ...... 220 
 
 The Abstinence from Sacrificial Meats and from Fornication - 220 
 
 The Relation between Master and Servant, and the Import of Apo- 
 stolic Reform - - - - - - -221 
 
 Marriage and Divorce ---_._ 223 
 
 The Christian Woman - - . - . 224 
 
 The Principle of Moral Responsibility the true test of Apostolic 
 
 Christianity ----,.-_ 224 
 
 Conclusion : Final Formula for the Development - - . 225 
 
 The Laiv-Book of the Ante-Nicene Church. 
 
 The original Shape of the First Collection, and its gradual Enlarf^e- 
 
 ment ------.. 227 
 
 The Second Collection -----_ 228 
 
 The general Results, and the Contrast of Old and New Canon Law - 228 
 
 Retrospective View : The Regeneration of the World in the Protes- 
 tant States. — The Law of Divorce and the Law of Slavery - 231 
 
ANALYTICAL TABLE OF CONTENTS. XXIX 
 
 Notes to the Interpretation and Application. 
 
 Page 
 
 Note A. The three Passages of Origen respecting Baptism - - 245 
 
 Note B. Liturgical Formularies of the German Lutheran Churches for 
 Confirmation : 
 I. A collective Formulary, compiled from the Ancient Agendas, 
 
 principally from that of Austria, of 1571 - - - 246 
 
 IL The Order of Confirmation, as agreed upon for the German Con- 
 gregation at Jerusalem _ . - - - 252 
 Note C. The History of the 20th of the Thirty-Nine Articles - 255 
 Note D. Works on the English Church, and on modern Liturgies in 
 
 general, referred to ----- - 256 
 
 THIRD PART. 
 
 THE APOLOGY OF HIPPOLTTUS ; OR, THE LIFE, CRITICISM, AND PHILO- 
 SOPHY OF THE ANCIENT FATHERS. 
 
 The Exordium: Hippolytus represents his general Grievance, and states 
 
 his Case -------- 265 
 
 Reasons why Hippolytus wishes to be judged by the English People : 
 his general Impressions of England and the English, and his 
 Disputes about them with the Successor of Irenseus at Lyons - 271 
 
 His Misgivings that the English will find no time for him - - 275 
 
 His Plan of Defence : Conclusion of the Exordium - - - 276 
 
 Hippolytus tells his Personal History : his Wife Chloe and his son 
 
 Anteros -------- 277 
 
 He relates the Dispute with his learned English Friends respecting the 
 
 genuine Text of the New Testament - - - - 28 1 
 
 How in his Conversations he explained, and in part defended, his alle- 
 gorical Interpretations against certain Interpreters of Daniel and 
 the Apocalypse ------- 284 
 
 Hippolytus is interrupted by "Vociferations : he defends himself for 
 having mentioned the Opinion of the German Critics on the Age 
 of the Book of Daniel, as deserving to be examined - - 288 
 
 He continues to explain the Feelings of the Ancient Christians re- 
 specting the End of the World, and contrasts them with the Views 
 of a certain English School, and their Prophecies - - 290 
 
 Hippolytus relates how a Divine of another School attacked his Ortho- 
 doxy, and regrets that he did not know the Creeds and Decrees of 
 the Councils, which could have guided him - . - 293 
 
XXX ANALYTICAL TABLE OF CONTENTS. 
 
 Page 
 
 What he thhiks of the Books which his English Friends had given him, 
 
 and of the Church-Creeds ..... 294 
 
 How he expressed Doubts respecting the Orthodoxy of his English 
 Friends; and how, after defending himself against the Reproach 
 of Germanizing, he made them agree to enter into a philosophical 
 Discussion on the Nicene Creed ----- 295 
 
 How he showed them that they did not believe as they ought in what 
 the Creeds say of the Father and of ths Creation, and of the 
 Infinite 297 
 
 How he expressed his Doubts as to their Belief in the Second Article 
 of the Nicene Creed, and in what is said of the Word and of the 
 Eternal Sonship - - - - - - - 299 
 
 What he said when they seemed afraid that certain Truths might be 
 
 dangerous ....... 300 
 
 How he intimated still more strongly his Doubts as to their genuine 
 Belief in the Spirit and in the Church ; and how, after having 
 defended his own Orthodoxy, he manifested his deep Anxiety for 
 them - - - - - - - - 302 
 
 How they were shocked to hear him say such things ; and how he 
 questioned them about their Notion concerning the Inspiration of 
 the Scriptures, and then explained the much higher View of the 
 Ancient Church in that respect, and how the rational Interpretation 
 of Scripture is the spiritual, the irrational the materialistic - 307 
 
 How his Christian Friends desired to know his View respecting the 
 present Controversy about Baptismal Regeneration, and how he 
 simply stated the View of the Ancient Church on Baptism - 312 
 
 How they expressed their Concern that he had spoken of Sacramental 
 Sacrifice, and how he entered with them into a Discussion re- 
 specting the Nature of the Sacrifice and of the Eucharist - 314 
 
 How he retorted this Point upon them, and proved to them that their 
 Controversies with th Church of Rome turned on a Question 
 entirely alien to the Ancient Church, namely, how the Sacramental 
 Elements are affected by the Eucharistic Sacrifice, and that the 
 Ancient Church was more adverse tLan they are to the idea of 
 Transubstantiation - - - - - -319 
 
 A last Question of a young English Friend - - . - 325 
 
 Hippolytus having exhausted his time, and obtained leave to continue, 
 completes his Defence : he shows, first, that he is not a Germanizer, 
 but that the German Divines luiderstand very well the Philoso- 
 phical Questions discussed by the Ancient Church. He complains 
 of some of them ..--_.- 326 
 
ANALYTICAL TABLE OP CONTENTS. XXXI 
 
 Page 
 
 He defends himself against the charge of not being of a good Christian 
 Temper, and of having expressed himself with Bitterness of Heart 
 against the Bishop of Rome, and having shown himself very ex- 
 clusive with respect to Christiaii Opinions and Communities - 331 
 
 How, respecting the Exclusiveness, he turns the tables upon them, and 
 
 reproves them for their Intolerance _ - ^ - 333 
 
 The Peroration : The concluding Address of Hippoly tus to his Judges : 
 his own and his Fellow Martyrs' Exhortation to the Christians of 
 this Age, not to be afraid of the Struggle for the Liberty of 
 Conscience and of the Spirit, which must precede the final Victory 
 of the Kingdom of God upon Earth - - - - 33 i 
 
 Editor's Notes to the Apology of Hippolytus, 
 
 Note to Title. The Ides of August, the Date of the Deposition of the 
 
 Remains of St. Hippolytus _ - _ - 339 
 
 Note 1. The Three Hippoly tuses whom the Church of Rome has made 
 
 out of the One - - - - - - 340 
 
 Note 2. The present Successor of Irenasus - - - - 341 
 
 Note 3. The Dean of the Sacred College - - - - 342 
 
 Note 4 . The Works and Monuments of Protestantism - - 342 
 
 Note 5, Cicero's Prophecy of the English Constitution, and of its 
 
 History - - - " - - - - 342 
 
 Note G. The Wife and Children of St. Hippolytus - - - 344 
 
 Note 7. The Inscription of Hei-on, belonging to the Temple of Serapis 
 
 at Portus, of the time of Hippolytus ... 344 
 
 Note 8. Callistus' Residence in Trastevere - - - - 345 
 
 Note 9. Hippolytus on the paramount Authority of Scripture - 345 
 
 Note 10. The Punctuation of the first Verses of the Prologue of St. 
 
 John's Gospel ------ 345 
 
 Note 11. The Canon of the New Testament in the Roman Church in 
 
 the Age of Hippolytus ----- 346 
 Note 12. The Belief of Hippolytus in the Facts of Clairvoyance, and 
 
 his wise Judgment upon this Subject _ - - 34fi 
 
 Note 13. The Passage of Hippolytus as to the Sacrifice in the Eucharist 346 
 Note 14. The Christian's only Sacrifice the spiritual one - - 347 
 
 Note 15. The ancient Christians did not talk Christ and Christianity, 
 
 but lived them - - - - - - 347 
 
 Note 16. The Martyrs died for the Liberty of Mankind - - 348 
 
 Supplementary Note. On the Forebodings among the Christians 
 of the Second and Third Centuries respecting the approaching 
 End of the World, and a Renewal of Mankind and Human 
 Society -------- 348 
 
XXXU ANALYTICAL TABLE OF CONTENTS. 
 
 APPENDIX. 
 
 ESSAYS ON THE CHRISTIAN SACRIFICE AND WORSHIP, AND ON THE 
 CONSTITUTION OF THE ANCIENT CHURCH. 
 
 Introductory Essay. 
 
 Page 
 
 General View of the Consciousness and Life of the Ancient Church, 
 respecting the Sacrifice and the Ecclesiastical Law and Govern- 
 ment -.-.-.-- 357 
 
 First Section. — Essays on the Christian Sacrijice and Worship, 
 
 I. Theses on the Eucharist which can be proved historically - 365 
 
 II. The Epochs of the History of the Christian Sacrifice and the 
 
 Eucharist - - - - - - - 369 
 
 UL The Nature of the Christian Sacrifice - - - . 334 
 
 Second Section. — Essays on the Constitviion of the Ancient Church. 
 L The Apostolical Constitutions ; their general Character, Origin, and 
 
 Importance _-_-_-_ 395 
 
 Appendix on the Apostolical Canons of the Codex Barberinus and 
 the Petersburgh MS., and on the Discoveries and Researches of 
 Bickell and Zenker respecting the Syrian Text of the Constitu- 
 tions ,.-----. 409 
 II. The Work of Hippolytus on the Gifts of the Holy Spirit, and 
 
 traces of this Work in the Apostolical Constitutions - - 412 
 
 HI. General Results respecting the A^jostolical Constitutions and 
 Canons : 
 
 A. General critical Results - - - - -418 
 
 B. General Results for the Philosophical History of the Age of 
 
 Hippolytus - - - - - - -421 
 
 I. As to tlie Genuineness and historical Importance of the 
 
 Apostolical Ordinances - - - - - 421 
 
 H. As to the Canons of the Apostles, and the ante-Nicene System 
 
 of Church Government - - . . . 422 
 
 Appendix on the Christian Sacrifice, 
 (Ch. V. VL VIL) 
 
 The principal passages of Irenaeus on the Christian Sacrifice : 
 
 I. Passages in his great woi'k of the Heresies - - - 405 
 
 II. The Pfaffian Fragments - - - . . 423 
 
 Preface to the Fourth Volimie of the First Edition - - - 43 1 
 
c 
 
 PART I. 
 
 CHURCH- AND HOUSE-BOOK 
 
 OF THE 
 
 ANCIENT CHRISTIANS, 
 
 AND 
 
 LAW-BOOK 
 
 OF ^ 
 
 THE ANTE-NICENE CHURCH. 
 
 VOL. ir. 
 
THE 
 
 Cl)uttl)' anD i^ousc-Booft 
 
 anrient CJirfetiansi* 
 
 THE TEXT IN FOUR BOOKS. 
 t^jB first book. 
 
 Ordinances respecting the Reception, the Instruction, the Pledge, and the Admission of 
 the Catechumens : or, the Instruction and Baptism of the Ancient Church. 
 
 THE SECOND BOOK. 
 
 Ordinances respecting the Offices of the Congregation : or, the Government and Con- 
 stitutions of the Ancient Church. 
 
 THE THIRD BOOK. 
 
 The Order and Formularies of the Service : or, the Christian Sacrifice and Worship, and 
 the Liturgy of the Ancient Church. 
 
 THE FOURTH BOOK. 
 
 Rules of general Christian Conduct for all Members of the Congregation: or, the 
 domestic, congregational, and social Life of the early Christians. 
 
 B 2 
 
FIRST BOOK. 
 
 THE RECEPTION, THE mSTRUCTION, THE PLEDGE, AND 
 THE ADMISSION 
 
 €f)t Caterfiumensi : 
 
 THE CHRISTIAN INSTRUCTION AND THE BAPTISM OF THE 
 EARLY CHURCH. 
 
 6^}^ 
 
 THIS BOOK CONTAINETH: 
 
 I. How they who require to be instructed are to be examined 
 before they are admitted. 
 II. How they who are admitted are instructed. 
 
 III. The Moral Catechism, or the Doctrine of the Two Ways. 
 
 IV. How, after a Year's Instruction, the Catechumens undergo an 
 
 Examination, and their Conduct is investigated before they 
 are admitted to hear the Gospel. 
 V. How they are dismissed with a Blessing, after the Sermon. 
 
 VI. The ancient Prayer for the Catechumens of tlie Church of 
 
 Antioch, as recorded by St. Chrysostom. 
 
 VII. That a Catechumen, who suiFereth Death for his Faith, hath 
 
 received the Baptism in his Blood. 
 VIII. How, after the Course of Instruction hath terminated, the 
 Catechumens, who are to be admitted, are separated and 
 sealed, for being baptized on Easter. 
 
 __ — 
 
IX. How the Water is to be prepared, and the general Order of 
 Baptism. 
 X. How the Oil for the Anointing is prepared. 
 XL How they are to renounce Satan, and be anointed, and then 
 say the Creed. 
 XII. How they are anointed by the Presbyter, and clothed and 
 conducted into the Church. 
 
 XIII. How the Bishop and the Elders bless and anoint their Heads 
 
 with the Chrisma ; and how the Baptized give the Peace. 
 
 XIV. How they receive the Eucharist and the Milk and Honey. 
 
 APPENDIX. 
 
 I. Different forms of the Apostolic Creed : 
 
 1. According to the Church of Rome ; 
 
 2. According to the Seventh Book of the Greek Constitu- 
 
 tions. 
 II. Ordinance that the Baptized is to pray the Lord's Prayer, as 
 Priest, before the People. 
 III. The Order of Baptism in the Church of Jerusalem, as recorded 
 by Cyrillus. 
 
Boofe J. 
 
 1. How they who require to be instructed are to be examined 
 before they are admitted. 
 
 'hose that first come to the Mystery of Godliness, 
 let them be brought to the Bishop, or to the Pres- 
 byters, [by the Deacons,] and let them be examined 
 as to the causes wherefore they come to the Word 
 of the Lord : and let those who bring them exactly 
 inquire about their Character, and give them their Testimony. 
 Let their manners, and their life, be inquired into ; and whether 
 they be Slaves or Freemen : and if any one be a Slave, let him 
 be asked who is his master. If he be Slave to one of the 
 Believers, let his master be asked if he can give him a good 
 character. If he cannot, let him be rejected until he show 
 himself to be worthy to his master : but if he does give him a 
 good character, let him be admitted. But if he be Slave to an 
 Heathen, let him be taught to please his master, that the Word 
 be not blasphemed. If then he have a wife, or a Woman hath a 
 husband, let them be taught to be content with each other, and 
 to live soberly ; but if they be unmarried, let them learn not 
 to commit fornication, but to enter into lawful marriage ; but 
 if his Master be one of the faithful, and knows that he is guilty 
 of fornication, and yet does not give him a wife, or to the 
 Woman a husband, let him be separated. 
 
 But if any one hath a Demon, let him indeed be taught God- 
 liness, but not received into communion before he be cleansed ; 
 yet if death be near, let him be received. 
 
 If any one be a Maintainer of Harlots, let him either leave off 
 to prostitute women, or else let him be rejected. 
 
 B 4 
 
The Church- and House-Book. 
 
 If a Whore come, let her leave off whoredom, or else let her 
 be rejected. 
 
 If a Maker of Idols come, let him either leave off his em- 
 ployment, or let him be rejected. 
 
 If one belonging to the Theatre come, whether it be man or 
 woman, or a charioteer, or a fighter in single combat, or a 
 racer, or an exhibitor of a show of gladiators, or an Olympic 
 gamester, or one that plays on the flute or on the lute at these 
 games, or a dancing-master, or a keeper of a public house, 
 either let them leave off their employments, or let them be 
 rejected. 
 
 If a Soldier come, let him be taught to do no injustice, to 
 accuse no man falsely , and to he content with his allotted stipend; 
 if he submit to these rules let him be received, but if he refuse 
 them, let him be rejected. 
 
 He that is guilty of Sins not to be named, a sodomite, an 
 effeminate person, a magician, an enchanter, an astrologer, a 
 diviner, an user of magic verses, a juggler, a mountebank, one 
 that makes amulets, a charmer, a soothsayer, a fortune-teller, 
 an observer of palmistry, he that when he meets you observes 
 defects in the eyes, or feet of the birds, or cats, or noises, or 
 symbolical sounds ; let these be proved for some time, for this 
 sort of wickedness is hard to be washed away ; and if they leave 
 off those practices, let them be received, but if they will not 
 agree to that, let them be rejected. 
 
 Let a Concubine, who is servant to an unbeliever, and con- 
 fines herself to her master alone, be received ; but if she be 
 incontinent with others, let her be rejected. 
 
 If one of the Believers hath a Concubine, if she be a bond- 
 servant, let him leave off that way, and contract a legal matri- 
 mony ; if she be a free woman, let him marry her in a lawful 
 manner ; if he doth not, let him be rejected ; if she liveth with 
 a believing Servant, let her leave off, or be rejected. 
 
 He that followeth the Gentile Customs, or Jewish Fables, 
 either let him. reform, or let him be rejected. 
 
 If any one followeth the Sports of the Theatre, their huntings. 
 
Book I. Of the Catechumens. 
 
 or horse-races, or combats, either let him leave them off, or let 
 him be rejected. (Greek Constitut. book viii. Compare Copt. 
 Can. book in. can. 4.) 
 
 If we have omitted anything, the circumstances will teach 
 you, for we have all the Spirit of God. (Copt. Can. conclusion 
 of can. 41.) 
 
 •#• 
 
 II. How they who are admitted are instructed. 
 
 TTE who is to be catechized, let him be catechize d Three 
 -*--'- Years ; but if any one be diligent, and has a good will 
 to his business, let him be admitted ; for it is not the Length 
 of Time, but the Course of Life that is judged. (Greek Const, 
 book VIII. ; Copt, Can. ii. 42.) 
 
 He that teacheth, although he be one of the Laity, yet if he 
 be skilful in the Word, and grave in his manners, let him 
 teach ; for, they shall he all taught of God. (Greek Const, 
 book VIII.) 
 
 III. The Moral Catechism, or the Doctrine of the Two Ways. 
 
 rPHERE are two ways, one is the Way of Life, and the other 
 -*- is the Way of Death : and there is much difference in these 
 two ways. But the Way of Life is. Thou shalt love the Lord 
 thy God with all thy heart, who created thee, and thou shalt 
 glorify Him who redeemed thee from death ; for this is the first 
 Commandment. 
 
 But the second is. Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself. 
 On these two Commandments hang the Law and the Prophets. 
 
 Every thing that thou wouldest not should be done to thee, 
 that do not thou also to another ; that is, what thou hatest do 
 not to another. 
 
10 The Church- and House-Book. 
 
 Thou shalt not kill ; thou shalt not commit adultery ; thou 
 shalt not commit fornication ; thou shalt not pollute a youth; 
 thou shalt not steal ; thou shalt not be a sorcerer ; thou shalt 
 not use divination ; thou shalt not cause a woman to miscarry, 
 neither if she has brought forth a child shalt thou kill it ; thou 
 shalt not covet any thing that is thy neighbour's ; thou shalt 
 not bear false witness; thou shalt not speak evil of any one, 
 neither shalt thou think evil ; thou shalt not be double-minded, 
 neither shalt thou be double-tongued, for a double tongue is a 
 snare of death ; thy speech shall not be vain, neither tending 
 to a lie ; thou shalt not be covetous, neither rapacious, nor an 
 hypocrite, nor of an evil heart, nor proud ; thou shalt not speak 
 an evil word against thy neighbour ; thou shalt not hate any 
 man, but thou shalt reprove some, and shalt have mercy upon 
 others ; thou shalt pray for some, and shalt love others as thy 
 own soul. 
 
 My Son, flee from all Evil, and hate all Evil. Be not angry, 
 because Anger leads to Murder, for Anger is an evil Demon. 
 Be not emulous, neither be contentious, nor quarrelsome, for 
 Envy proceeds from these. 
 
 My Son, be not of unlawful Desires, because Desire leadeth 
 to Fornication, drawing men to it involuntarily ; for Lust is a 
 Demon. For if the evil Spirit of Anger is united with that of 
 Lust, they destroy those who shall receive them. And the 
 Way of the evil Spirit is the Sin of the Soul. For when he 
 spyeth a httle way, quietly entering in he will make the way 
 broad ; and he will take with him all other evil Spirits ; he will 
 go to that Soul and will not leave the man to meditate at all, 
 lest he should see the truth. Let a Restraint be put upon your 
 Anger, and curb it with not a little care, that you may cast it 
 behind you, lest it should precipitate you into some evil deed. 
 For Wrath and evil Desire, if they be suffered always to remain, 
 are Demons. And when they have Dominion over a man they 
 change him in Soul, that he may be prepared for a great deed : 
 and when they have led him into unrighteous acts, they deride 
 him, and will rejoice in the destruction of that man. 
 
Book I. Of the Catechumens. 1 1 
 
 My Son, be not the Utterer of an evil Expression, nor of 
 Obscenity, neither be thou haughty, for of these things come 
 Adulteries. 
 
 My Son, be not a Diviner, for Divination leadeth to Idolatry; 
 neither be thou an Enchanter, nor an Astrologer, nor a Magician, 
 nor an Idolater ; neither teach them nor hear them ; for from 
 these things proceedeth Idolatry. 
 
 My Son, be not a Liar, because a Falsehood leadeth to 
 Blasphemy. Neither be thou a Lover of Silver nor a Lover of 
 Vainglory, for from these Thefts arise. 
 
 My Son, be not a Murmurer, because Repining leadeth 
 a man to Blasphemy. Be thou not harsh, nor a thinker of 
 evil, for of all these things Contentions are begotten. But be 
 thou meek, for the meek shall inherit the earth. And be thou 
 also merciful, peaceable, compassionate, cleansed in thy heart 
 from all evil. Be thou sincere, gentle, good ; trembling at the 
 words of God, which thou hast heard, and do thou keep them. 
 Do not exalt thyself, neither shalt thou give thy heart to pride, 
 but thou shalt increase more and more with the just and humble. 
 Every Evil which cometh upon thee receive as Good, knowing 
 that nothing shall come upon thee but from God. 
 
 My Son, he who declareth to thee the Word of God, and 
 hath been the cause of life to thee, and hath given to thee the 
 holy Seal which is in the Lord, thou shalt love him as the apple 
 of thine eyes, and remember him by night and day ; thou shalt 
 honour him as of the Lord : for in that place in which the word 
 of power is, there is the Lord ; and thou shalt seek his face 
 daily, him, and those who remain of the Saints, that thou may est 
 rest thee on their words : for he who is united to the Saints 
 shall be holy. 
 
 Thou shalt honour him according to thy power, by the Sweat 
 of thy Brow, and by the Labour of thy Hands : for if the Lord 
 hath made thee meet that he might impart to thee spiritual food, 
 and spiritual drink, and eternal life, by him ; it becometh thee 
 also the more, that thou shouldest impart to him the food which 
 perisheth and is temporal ; for the Labourer is worthy of his 
 
12 The Church- and House- Book. 
 
 Hire. For it is written : Thou shalt not muzzle the ox that 
 treadeth out the corn ; neither doth any one plant a vineyard, 
 and not eat of the fruit thereof. 
 
 Thou shalt not cause Schisms : thou shalt reconcile in peace 
 those who contend with one another. Judge in Righteousness 
 without acceptation of Persons. Reprove him who hath sinned, 
 for his Sin. Suffer not Wealth to prevail before God, neither 
 justify the Unworthy, for beauty profiteth not ; but righteous 
 judgment before all. Doubt not in thy Prayer, thinking whether 
 what thou hast asked of Him will be or not. Let it not, indeed, 
 be, that when thou receivest thou stretchest out thine hand, 
 but when thou shouldest give thou drawest thy hand to thee. 
 But if thou hast at hand, thou shalt give for the Redemption of 
 thy Sins. Thou shalt not doubt, thou shalt give ; neither when 
 thou hast given shalt thou murmur, knowing there is a reward 
 of God. Thou shalt not turn away from the Needy, but shalt 
 communicate with the Needy in all things : thou shalt not say, 
 these things are mine alone. If ye communicate with one 
 another in those things which are incorruptible, how much 
 rather should ye not do it in those things which are corruptible ? 
 
 I beseech you, my Brethren, while you have time, and he 
 who asketh remains with you, if you are able to do good to 
 them, do not fail in any thing to any one, which you have the 
 power to do. 
 
 For the Day of the Lord draweth nigh; in which every thing 
 that is seen shall be dissolved, and the Wicked shall be destroyed 
 with it ; for the Lord cometh, and his reward is with him. 
 
 Be ye lawgivers to your own selves ; be ye Teachers to your- 
 selves alone, as God hath taught you. Thou shalt keep those 
 things which thou hast received; thou shalt not take from them, 
 neither shalt thou add to them. (Introduction to the Coptic 
 Canons, book i.) 
 
Book I. Of the Catechumens. 13 
 
 IV. How, after the first Course of Instruction, the Catechumens 
 undergo an Examination, and their Conduct is iyivesti- 
 gated before they are admitted to hear the Gospel, and 
 how long their Instruction is to last, 
 
 WHEN they have chosen those appointed to receive Baptism, 
 let their Life be inquired into, vsrhether they have lived 
 in Chastity during the time of being Catechumens ; whether 
 they have honoured the Widows ; whether they have visited 
 the Sick ; whether they have fulfilled every good work. And 
 if those who have introduced them have witnessed to them that 
 they have done thus, let them hear the Gospel. Let the Cate- 
 chumens be Three Years hearing the Word ; but if one hath 
 been diligent and persevereth well in the work, the Time shall 
 not decide, but the Application alone shall entirely decide it. 
 (Copt. Can. b. ii. 45*. 4^.) 
 
 V. How they are dismissed with a Blessing, after the Sermon. 
 
 WHEN the Teacher hath ended the Sermon, let the Cate- 
 chumens pray by themselves apart, and the faithful apart. 
 And let the Women stand praying in a place in the Church, 
 apart by themselves, whether the faithful women or the women 
 Catechumens. And when they conclude praying, let them not 
 give the Salutation (Peace) before they are pure. 
 
 Let the Believers salute one another, the men with the men 
 alone, and the women with the women. But let not a man 
 salute a woman. And let all the Women not cover their heads 
 with a costly Veil, but with a fine cloth of cotton alone, for this 
 is their veil. 
 
 When the Teacher after the Prayer shall lay his hands upon 
 the Catechumens, let him pray, dismissing them ; whether he 
 be an Ecclesiastic or a Layman who delivereth it, let him do so. 
 (Copt. Can. b. II. 43, 44.) 
 
14 The Church- and House-Book. 
 
 VI. The ancient Prayers of the Church of Antioch for the 
 Catechumens, as recorded hy St. Chrysostom. 
 
 (^The Catechumens pray silently, the Congregation standeth.) 
 
 TT ET US pray earnestly for the Catechumens, that the all- 
 -*-■ loving and all-merciful God may hear their Prayer : that 
 He may open the ears of their hearts, in order that they may 
 perceive what no eye hath seen, no ear hath heard, and what is 
 not come into the heart of any one ( 1 Cor. ii. 9.) ; that He may 
 teach them the word of truth, and that He may sow in their 
 hearts the seed of the fear of God : that He may strengthen 
 the faith in their hearts : that He may reveal to them the 
 Gospel of righteousness : that He may give them a godlike 
 mind, pure thoughts, and a virtuous life, alwaj's to think what 
 is of God, to meditate what is of God, to care for what is of 
 God. 
 
 Let us pray still more earnestly for them : that He may pre- 
 serve them from every evil and wicked deed, from every devilish 
 sin, and from every deceit of the enemy : that He may make 
 them worthy, at due time, of the laver of regeneration and of 
 the forgiveness of sins : that He may bless their going in and 
 their going out, their whole life, their houses, and their families : 
 that He may increase and bless their children, that He may 
 bring them to the right age, and make them wise : that He 
 may thus direct all which they propose to do, as may be most 
 expedient for them. 
 
 TTie Deacon to the Catechumens : 
 
 Rise ! 
 
 Address to the standing Catechumens : 
 
 Pray for the Angel of Peace, ye Catechumens, that what you 
 propose may be fulfilled in peace. 
 
 Pray that this day and all the days of your life may be 
 peaceful, and that your end may be Christian. 
 
Book I. Of the Catechumens. 15 
 
 Recommend yourselves to the living God and to His Christ. 
 Bend your heads. 
 
 ( They receive the blessing : the whole congregation saying .- Amen.) 
 
 (St. Chrysost. 2d Homily on the Second Epistle to 
 the Corinthians.) 
 
 VII. That a Catechumen ivho suffereth Death for the Faith, 
 hath received Baptism in his Blood. 
 
 IF a Catechumen has been apprehended for the Name of the 
 Lord, let him not hesitate to give the Testimony ; for if 
 they have taken him by violence that they may kill him, he 
 will be justified and receive the Forgiveness of his Sins ; for he 
 will have received Baptism in his own Blood. (Copt. Can. b. ii. 
 44.) 
 
 VIII. Hoiv, after the Course of Instruction has terminated, 
 those Catechumens ivho are to he admitted are sepa- 
 rated and sealed for being baptized at Easter. 
 
 A ND when they shall be separated, let them lay hands upon 
 -^--*- them on that day, exorcising them. 
 
 And when the day approacheth on which they shall be bap- 
 tized, let the Bishop exorcise each one of them, that he may know 
 that they are pure. But if any one is not good, or is not clean, 
 let them put him apart, that he may not hear the Word with 
 the Believers ; for it is not possible that a stranger can ever be 
 concealed. Let them teach those appointed for Baptism that 
 they should wash and be made free; that they should be made 
 
16 The Church- and House-Book. 
 
 so on the fifth Sabbath (viz. on the Saturday in the fifth 
 week of Lent, the Saturday before Pahn Sunday). 
 
 Let them, who are to receive Baptism, fast on the Prepar- 
 ation of the Sabbath (Friday). But on the Sabbath, when those 
 who shall receive have been gathered together in one place, by 
 the advice of the Bishop, let them all be commanded to pray 
 and to kneel ; and when he hath laid his hand upon them, let 
 him exorcise every strange Spirit to flee from them, and not to 
 return into them from that time. And when he hath finished 
 exorcising, let him breathe on them ; and when he hath sealed 
 their foreheads, and their ears, and the opening of their mouths, 
 let him raise them up ; and let them watch all the night, reading 
 to them, and exhorting them. And let those who shall receive 
 Baptism not take any thing but that alone, which each one shall 
 bring in for the Thanksgiving ; for it is becoming him who is 
 worthy, that he should bring in his Offering immediately. 
 (Copt. Can. b. 11. 45^) 
 
 IX. How the Water is to be prepared, and the general Order of 
 
 Baptism. 
 
 A ND at the time of the Crowing of the Cock let them first 
 -^-^ pray over the Water. Let the Water be drawn into the 
 font, or flow into it. And let it be thus, if they have no 
 scarcity. But if there be a scarcity, let them pour the Water 
 which shall be found into the font ; and let them undress them- 
 selves, and the Young shall be first baptized. And after the 
 adult Men have been baptized, at the last the Women, having 
 loosed all their hair, and having laid aside their ornaments of 
 gold and silver which were on them. Let not any one take a 
 strange garment with him into the Water. (Copt. Can. b. ii. 
 46.) 
 
Book I. Of the Catechumens. 17 
 
 X. How the Oil for the Anointing is prepared. 
 
 A ND at the time which is appointed for the Baptism let the 
 -^-^ Bishop give thanks over the Oil, which, putting into a 
 vessel, he shall call the Oil of Thanksgiving. Again, he shall 
 take the other Oil, and exorcising over it, he shall call it the 
 Oil of Exorcism. And a Deacon shall bear the Oil of Exorcism, 
 and stand on the left hand of the Presbyter. Another Deacon 
 shall take the Oil of Thanksgiving, and stand on the right hand 
 of the Presbyter. (Copt. Can. b. ii. 46.) 
 
 XL How they are to renounce Satan and he anointed: and 
 then say the Creed. 
 
 A ND when the Presbyter has taken hold of each one of those 
 -^-*- who are about to receive Baptism, let him command him 
 to renounce, saying : " I will renounce thee, Satan, and all thy 
 service, and all thy works." And when he has renounced all 
 these, let him anoint him with the Oil of Exorcism, saying : 
 " Let every Spirit depart from thee." And let tlie Bishop or 
 the Presbyter receive him thus undressed, to place him in the 
 Water of Baptism. Also let the Deacon go with him into the 
 Water, and let him say to him, helping him that he may say : " I 
 believe in the only true God, the Father Almighty, and in His 
 only begotten Son Jesus Christ, oar Lord and Saviour, and in 
 the Holy Spirit, the quickener." 
 
 And let him who receiveth Baptism repeat after all these : 
 " I believe thus." And he who bestoweth it shall lay his hand 
 upon the head of him who receiveth, dipping him Three Times, 
 confessing these things each time. And afterwards let him say 
 again: "Dost thou believe in our Lord Jesus Christ, the only 
 Son of God the Father ; that he became man in a wonderful 
 
 VOL. II. c 
 
18 The Church- and House-Book. 
 
 manner for us, in an incomprehensible unity, by his Holy Spirit, 
 of Mary the Holy Virgin, without the seed of man, and that he 
 was crucified for us under Pontius Pilate, and died of his own 
 will once for our Redemption, and rose on the third day, loosing 
 the bands of Death ; that he ascended up into Heaven, and sate 
 on the right hand of his good Father on high, and that he cometh 
 again to judge the Living and the Dead at the appearing of Him 
 and his kingdom ? And dost thou believe in the Holy good 
 Spirit, and quickener, who wholly purifieth in the Holy Church ?" 
 Let him again say : " I believe." (Copt. Can. b. ii. 46.) 
 
 XII. How they are anointed hy the Presbyter, and clothed and 
 conducted into the Church. 
 
 AND let them go up out of the Water, and the Presbyter 
 shall anoint him with the Oil of Thanksgiving : saying, 
 " I anoint thee with holy anointing oil, in the name of Jesus 
 Christ." Thus he shall anoint every one of the rest, and clothe 
 them as the rest, and they shall enter into the Church. (Copt. 
 Can. b. II. 46.) 
 
 •#• 
 
 XIII. Hoio the Bishop and the Elders bless and anoint the Heads 
 of the Catechumens ivith the Chrism ; and how the 
 Baptized give the Peace. 
 
 LET the Bishop lay his hand upon them with affection, say- 
 ing : " Lord God, as thou hast made these worthy to 
 receive the forgiveness of their sins in the world to come, make 
 them worthy to be filled with thy Holy Spirit, and send upon 
 them thy grace, that they may serve thee according to tliy will, 
 for Thine is the glory, thou who art the Father and the Son and 
 
Book I. Of the Catechumens. 19 
 
 the Holy Spirit, in the Holy Church, now and always, and 
 for ever and ever." And he shall pour of the Oil of Thanks- 
 giving in his hand, and put his hand upon the head of each, 
 saying: "I anoint thee with the holy anointing oil, from 
 God the Father Almighty, and Jesus Christ, and the Holy 
 Spirit/' And he shall seal upon his forehead, saluting him. 
 And he shall say : " The Lord be with thee." He, who hath 
 been sealed, shall answer : " And with thy spirit." Each one 
 (of the Presbyters) doing thus with the remaining. And let 
 all the People pray together. And all those who receive 
 Baptism shall be praying ; let them say Peace with their 
 mouths. (Copt. Can. b. ii. 46.) 
 
 XIV. How they receive the Eucharist and the Milk and Honey. 
 
 T ET the Deacons bring the Eucharist to the Bishop, and he 
 -Li shall give thanks over the Bread, because of the similitude 
 of the Flesh of Christ, and over the Cup of Wine, because it is 
 the Blood of Christ, which was poured out for every one who 
 believeth on him ; and Milk and Honey mixed, for fulfilling the 
 Promises to the Fathers, because he hath said : " I will give 
 you a land flowing with milk and honey." This is the Flesh 
 of Christ, which was given for us, that those who believe on 
 him should be nourished by it as Infants ; that Bitterness of 
 Heart may be dissipated by the Sweetness of the Word. All 
 these things the Bishop shall discourse to those who shall receive 
 Baptism. 
 
 And when the Bishop hath divided the Bread, let him give a 
 portion to each of them, saying : " This is the Bread of heaven, 
 the Body of Christ Jesus." Let him who receiveth it answer : 
 " Amen." 
 
 And if there are not more Presbyters there, let the Deacons 
 take the Cup, and they shall stand in order, that they may give 
 
 c 2 
 
20 The Church' and House-Booh. 
 
 them the blood of Christ Jesus our Lord, and the Milk, and the 
 Honey. Let him who giveth the Cup say : " This is the Blood 
 of Christ Jesus our Lord ; " and he who receiveth it again shall 
 answer : " Amen." 
 
 And when these things have been done, let every one hasten 
 to do all good things, and to please God, and to take care to 
 live in integrity, being diligent in the Church, doing those 
 things which they have been taught, proceeding in the service 
 of God. (Copt. Can. b. ii. 46.) 
 
Book I. Of the Catechumens. 21 
 
 APPENDIX. 
 
 I. 
 
 I 
 
 1. 
 
 According to the Church of Rome. 
 
 BELIEVE in God the Father Almighty : 
 And in Jesus Christ his only Son our Lord : 
 
 Who was by the Holy Ghost born of the Virgin Mary, 
 
 Sujffered under Pontius Pilate, 
 
 Was crucified and buried. 
 
 The third day he rose again from the Dead, 
 
 He ascended into Heaven, sitteth at the right hand of 
 
 God the Father, 
 From thence he shall come to judge the Quick and the 
 Dead. 
 I believe in the Holy Ghost : 
 The holy Church : 
 The Forgiveness of Sins : 
 The Resurrection of the Body. Amen. 
 
 c 3 
 
22 The Church- and House-Book. 
 
 2. 
 
 According to the Seventh Book of the Greek Constitutions 
 
 (doubtful). 
 
 "T BELIEVE in one, uncreated, the only true, Almighty God 
 -*- the Father of Christ : 
 
 Creator and Maker of all things : 
 And in the Lord Jesus Christ, 
 his only-begotten Son 
 
 the First-born of the whole Creation [not created] 
 
 who before the Ages was begotten 
 
 by the good will of the Father 
 
 by whom all things are made in Heaven and on 
 
 Earth, visible and invisible : 
 who in the last Days descended from Heaven and 
 took Flesh, 
 and was born of the holy Virgin Mary : 
 and conversed holily according to the Laws of his God 
 
 and Father, 
 and was crucified under Pontius Pilate, 
 and died for us, 
 and after he had suffered rose the third Day from the 
 
 Dead, 
 ascended into Heaven, 
 
 and sitteth at the right hand of the Father, 
 and again is to come with Glory 
 in the Consummation of Time 
 to judge the Quick and the Dead 
 of whose Kingdom there will be no end : 
 And in the Holy Ghost, the Comforter, 
 
 who wrought in all the holy Men from the beginning of 
 the World, 
 
Book I, Of the Catechumens. 23 
 
 and afterwards was sent to the Apostles 
 
 by the Father, according to the promise 
 of our Lord Jesus Christ, 
 and after the Apostles to all Believers : 
 And in the holy Catholic Church, 
 
 in the Resurrection of the Flesh, 
 
 in the Remission of the Sins, 
 
 in the Kingdom of Heaven, 
 
 and in the Life of the World to come. 
 
 11. 
 
 An Ordinance that the Baptized is to say aloud the Lord^s 
 Prayer, as Priest, before the People. 
 
 T ET him pray as a Son to the Father, and say, as if speaking 
 ^-^ in the name of all the Christian Congregation present : 
 
 Our Father which art in Heaven : hallowed be thy Name : 
 thy Kingdom come : thy Will be done in Earth as it is 
 done in Heaven : give us this Day our daily Bread : and 
 forgive us our Debts, as we forgive our Debtors : and lead 
 us not into Temptation, but deliver us from Evil : for 
 thine is the Kingdom and the Power and the Glory now 
 and for ever. Amen. 
 
 (Greek Const, book iii. 17.) 
 
 c 4 
 
24 The Church- and House-Book. 
 
 III. 
 
 The Order of Baptism in the Church of Jerusalem, as recorded 
 hy Cyril, in his Sermotis to the newly Baptized (Catecheses 
 Mystag. I. Ill,), preached in the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, 
 about 350 or 360. 
 
 "T7"0U went first into the Porch (the Baptistery), and, being 
 -*- placed towards the West, you heard the Command, to 
 stretch out your hands, and to renounce Satan, as if he was 
 present .... and to say : I renounce Satan .... and all his 
 Works .... and all his Pomp, and all his Service. 
 
 After this thou wast turned towards the East, and wast 
 ordered to say : I believe in the Father, and in the Son, and in 
 the Holy Ghost, and in a Baptism of repentance. 
 
 All this was done in the Porch. But when you were entered 
 into the inner house, you took off your garment : and thus you 
 were anointed with the Holy Oil from the top of the Head to 
 the sole of the Feet .... Then you were conducted to the 
 Font of the Holy Baptism, and every one of you was asked : 
 whether he believed in the name of the Father and the Son 
 and the Holy Ghost? And you made the sound Confession of 
 Faith, and were three times immersed into the Water. . . . 
 
 •#'M'i 
 
SECOND BOOK. 
 
 ^f^t aron0tittttion of tf^c eaxlv Cfjurrlb* 
 
 ^^ 
 
 THIS BOOK CONTAINETH: 
 
 A. The First Set of Ordinances of the Church of Alexandria re- 
 specting the Clergy. — Coptic Collection, first book ; and 
 Ethiopic Collection. 
 
 I. How a Bishop is to be elected, and what is required of him. 
 
 II. That the Bishop is to ordain two, or rather three. Presbyters. 
 
 III. How the Reader is to be proved, and what is required of him. 
 
 1V^ How the Deacon is to be proved, and what is required of him. 
 
 IV''. Additional Ordinances respecting the Deacons. 
 
 V. How three Widows are to be appointed, and what are their 
 
 duties. 
 
 VI. For what purpose Deaconesses are to be appointed. 
 
 B. The Second Set of Ordinances of the Church of Alexandria re- 
 specting the Clergy. — Coptic Collection, second book. 
 
 I. How a Bishop is to be elected and ordained, and how he is to 
 
 say the Thanksgiving. 
 I*. The same, according to the Ethiopic Collection. 
 II*. How a Presbyter is to be ordained, according to the Ethiopic 
 Collection. 
 
II. The same, according to the Coptic Collection, 
 
 III. How a Deacon is to be appointed, and what is his office. 
 
 IV. In what a Presbyter difFereth from an Elder. 
 
 V. That a Confessor needeth no Ordination to become Deacon or 
 Presbyter. 
 VI. How a Reader is to be appointed. 
 VII. How Widows are to be appointed. 
 VIII. How Virgins are to be appointed. 
 IX. What is to be done with him who hath the Gifts of Healing. 
 
 C. The Third Set of Ordinances of the Church of Alexandria re- 
 specting the Clergy. — Coptic Collection, fourth book. 
 
 I. How a Bishop is to be elected, proved, and ordained. 
 11. How the Bishop is to ordain a Presbyter or Deacon. 
 
 III. How he is to appoint [Subdeacons and] Readers and Dea- 
 
 connesses. 
 
 IV. That a Confessor needeth no Ordination, unless made a 
 
 Bishop. 
 V. Against arrogant and presumptuous Confessors. 
 VI. Virgins not to be ordained. 
 VII. Precautions in the Appointment of Widows. 
 VIII. Precautions as to persons who have the Gift of Healing the 
 Possessed. 
 IX. Additional Ordinance as to the case of a Bishop having been 
 
 ordained by one Bishop only. 
 X. General Definitions of the peculiar Right and Power of the 
 diflFerent Members of the Clergy. 
 
 APPENDIX. 
 
 A. The Requisites and Duties of a Bishop according to the Third 
 
 Book of the Greek Apostolical Constitutions. 
 
 B. On the Marriage of Clergy. 
 
JSooft M. 
 
 A. 
 
 THE FIRST SET 
 
 OF 
 
 <©rUinan«s of tit Cj&urcS of ^Itxantiria rtsptctmg ti)e 
 
 ODlcrgg. 
 
 (Coptic Collection, first book ; Ethiopic Collection.) 
 
 I. How a Bishop is to he elected, and what is required of him. 
 
 T^^F there should be a Place having a few faithful 
 Men in it, before the multitude increase, who shall 
 be able to make a Dedication to Pious Uses for 
 the Bishop, to the extent of Twelve Men, let them 
 write to the Churches round about the place, 
 in which the multitude of the believers (assemble and) are 
 established. 
 
 That Three chosen Men in that Place may come, that they 
 may examine with diligence him who has been thought worthy 
 of this Degree, whether he have a good Reputation among the 
 People, as being guiltless, without anger, a lover of the poor, 
 prudent, wise, not given to wine, not a fornicator, not covetous, 
 not a contemner, not partial, and the like of these things. 
 
28 The Church- and House-Book. 
 
 If he have not a Wife it is a good thing ; but if he have 
 married a Wife, having Children, let him abide with her, 
 continuing steadfast in every doctrine, able to explain the 
 Scriptures v^ell ; but if he be ignorant of Literature, let him be 
 meek; let him abound in Love towards every man, lest they 
 should accuse the Bishop in any affair, and he should be at all 
 culpable. (Copt. Coll. book i. can. 16.) 
 
 II. That the Bishop is to ordain Two, or rather Three, 
 
 Presbyters. 
 
 TF the Bishop whom they shall appoint hath attended to the 
 -^- Knowledge and Patience of the Love of God with those with 
 him, let him ordain Two Presbyters when he hath examined 
 them, or rather Three. 
 
 It behoveth the Presbyters that they should live in the 
 World, after the manner of old Men, removing far off, that they 
 should not touch a woman, being charitable, lovers of the 
 brethren ; that they should not accept persons, being partakers 
 of the holy mysteries with the Bishop, assisting in all things, 
 collecting the multitude together, that they may love their 
 Shepherd. And the Presbyters on the Right Hand have the 
 care of those who labour at the Altar, that they should honour 
 those who are worthy of all honour, and rebuke those who 
 merit their rebuke. The Presbyters on the Left Hand shall 
 have the care of the People, that they may be upright, that no 
 one may be disturbed. And they shall instruct them that they 
 ,««hould be in all subjection. But when they have instructed 
 one, answering contumaciously, those within the Altar should 
 be of one heart, and one mind, that they may receive the 
 reward of that honour according to its desert. And all the rest 
 shall fear lest they should deviate, and one of them should be- 
 come changed like one wasting away, and all should be brought 
 into captivity. (Copt. Can. 17, 18.) 
 
Book II. The Constitution of the early Church. 29 
 
 III. How the Reader is to he proved, and rvhat is required 
 
 of him. 
 
 rpHE Reader shall be appointed after he hath been fully 
 -*- proved ; one who bridleth his tongue, not a drunkard, no 
 a derider in his speech, but decorous in his appearance ; 
 obedient, being the first to congregate on the Lord's Day ; a 
 Servant knowing what is meet for him, that he may fulfil the 
 Work of publishing the Gospel. For he who filleth the Ears 
 of others with his Doctrines, it becometh him the more that he 
 should be a faithful Workman before God. (Copt. Can. 19.) 
 
 •#• 
 
 IV*. How the Deacon is to be proved^ and what is required 
 
 of him. 
 
 V ET the Deacons be appointed by Three testifying to their 
 -*-^ Life. For it is written : " By the mouth of two or three 
 witnesses shall every word be established." Let them be 
 proved in every Service, all the People bearing witness to them, 
 that they have resided with one wife, have brought up their 
 children well, being humble, prudent, meek, sober, quiet ; not 
 vehement, nor murmurers ; not double-tongued, nor wrathful, 
 for wrath destroyeth the wise ; nor hypocrites. They shall not 
 afflict the Poor, neither shall they accept the persons of the 
 Rich ; they shall not be drinkers of much wine, being ready to 
 act in every good service in secret. Cheerful in their habitations, 
 constraining the Brethren who have, that they should open their 
 hand to give. And they also being givers, the goods being in 
 common, that the People may honour them with all honour, 
 and all fear, beseeching with great earnestness those who walk 
 in dissimulation. And some they should teach, and some they 
 should rebuke, but the rest they should prohibit. But let those 
 
30 The Church- and House-Book. 
 
 who despise, and the contumacious, be cast out, knowing that 
 all Men who are vehement or slanderers fight against Christ. 
 (Copt. Can. 20.) 
 
 •#• 
 
 IV^. Additional Ordinance respecting the Deacons. 
 
 T ET the Deacons be doers of good Works, drawing near by 
 -^ day and night in every place. They must not exalt them- 
 selves above the Poor, neither must they accept the persons of 
 the Rich. They shall know the Afflicted, that they may give 
 to him out of their store of Provisions ; constraining those who 
 are able for good works to gather them in, attending to the 
 words of our Master: *' I was an hungered, and ye gave me 
 meat." For those who have ministered without Sin, gain for 
 themselves much confidence. (Copt. Can. 22.) 
 
 #• 
 
 V. How three Widows are to he appointed, and what are their 
 
 Duties. 
 
 T ET three Widows be appointed ; two that they may give 
 -'-' their whole attention to prayer for every one who is in 
 temptations, and that they may render thanks to Him whom 
 they follow. But the other one should be left constantly with 
 the women who are tried in sickness, ministering well ; watching 
 and telling to the Presbyters the things which take place. No't 
 a lover of filthy lucre ; not given to drink : that she may be 
 able to watch, that she may minister in the night. And if an- 
 other desireth to help to do good works, let her do so according 
 to the pleasure of her heart; for these are the good things 
 which the Lord first commanded. (Copt. Can. 21.) 
 
Book 11. TTie Constitution of the early Church. 31 
 
 VI. For what Purpose Deaconesses are to he appointed. 
 
 C CHRIST gave no place for the Women, that they might help 
 ^ at the Altar. Martha said of Mary : •' See how she laughs." 
 Mary said : *' I laughed not ; but he said to us, teaching, that 
 the weak shall be liberated by the strong." 
 
 Some say, it becometh the Women to pray standing, and 
 that they should not cast themselves down upon the Earth. 
 
 Women are not to be appointed for a Service, besides this 
 Service only, that they assist the Indigent. (Copt. Can. 26 — 
 28.) 
 
 •#^-# 
 
32 The Church- and House-Book. 
 
 B. 
 
 THE SECOND SET 
 
 OF 
 
 <©tt(mances of tj^c CDj^urc]^ of ^kxantiria respecting tf)e 
 
 ClerQB. 
 
 (Coptic Collection, second book.) 
 
 I. How a Bishop is to he elected and ordained, and koto he is 
 to say the Thanksgiving. 
 
 A BISHOP shall be ordained who hath been chosen by all 
 -^--*- the People and is blameless. When the name of this one 
 hath been named and they have agreed, all the People shall 
 assemble together, and the Presbyters and Deacons, on the 
 Lord's Day, all the Bishops consenting; and the Presbyters 
 standing quietly, and they all being silent together, they shall 
 pray in their heart that the Holy Spirit may descend upon him. 
 And he who is worthy out of the Bishops, every one standing, 
 putteth his hand upon him whom they have made a Bishop, 
 praying over him. And when he is made a Bishop, let all give 
 the Salutation of Peace to him, saluting him with the mouth. 
 And let the Deacons present the Holy Communion to him. 
 And he, when he hath put his hand upon the Eucharist with 
 the Presbyters, let him say the Thanksgiving : " The Lord be 
 with you all." Let all the People say : " And with thy spirit." 
 He shall say : " Lift up your hearts." The People shall say : 
 " We have them to the Lord." Pie shall say again : " Let us 
 
Book II. The Constitution of the early Church. 33 
 
 give thanks to the Lord." All the People shall say : " (It is) 
 worthy and just." And let him pray thus, saying the (Prayers) 
 following these, according to the custom of the Holy Com- 
 munion. (Copt. Coll. book II. can. 31.) 
 
 I*. The same according to the Ethiopic Collection. 
 
 rpHE Bishop shall be chosen by all the People. He must be 
 ^ without blame, as it is written in the Apostle (Epistle to 
 Timothy). In the week in which he is to be ordained, if all the 
 People say of him, *' We choose him," he is not to be molested. 
 And they shall pray over him, and say : " O God, show Thy 
 love to this man whom Thou hast prepared for us." And they 
 shall choose one of the Bishops and one of the Presbyters ; and 
 they shall lay their hands upon his head and pray. (Ethiopic 
 Coll. can. 2.) 
 
 II*. How a Presbyter is to he ordained, according to that same 
 Ethiopic Collection. 
 
 TT7HEN a Presbyter is to be ordained, there shall be done 
 ^ ^ to him in every respect as is done to a Bishop, except 
 placing him on the Cathedra, and they shall pray over him all 
 the Prayers of the Bishop, except tHe name of the Bishop only ; 
 and the Presbyter shall equal the Bishop in every thing except 
 the name of the Cathedra and of Ordination. For he hath not 
 given to him the power of Ordination. (The same, can. 4.) 
 
 #• 
 
 VOL. II. 
 
34 The Church- and House-Book. 
 
 II. The same, according to the Coptic Collection. 
 
 A ND when the Bishop shall ordain a Presbyter, he shall put 
 -^^ his hands upon his head, and all the Presbyters shall touch 
 him. And let him pray over him, according to the form which 
 we have spoken of concerning the Bishops. (Copt. Can. 32.) 
 
 •# 
 
 III. How a Deacon is to he appointed, and what is his Office. 
 
 A ND the Bishop shall appoint a Deacon who hath been 
 -^-^ chosen : the Bishop alone shall lay his hands on him : 
 because he shall not be ordained for the Priesthood but for the 
 service of the Bishop, that he may do those things which he 
 shall command him. Neither shall he be appointed, that he 
 may be of the Council of all the Clergy, but that he may take 
 care of the Sick, and he shall make them known to the Bishop. 
 Neither shall he be appointed that he may receive the Spirit of 
 Greatness which the Presbyter shall receive, but that he may 
 be worthy that the Bishop may believe him in those things 
 which it behoveth him. On this account the Bishop alone shall 
 ordain the Deacon. (Copt. Can. 33*.) 
 
 •#■ 
 
 IV. In what a Bishop differs from an Elder. 
 
 T) UT the Bishop shall ordain the Presbyter. He shall lay 
 -^-^ the hand on him, because that same Spirit cometh upon 
 him : for the Presbyter receiveth it only, he hath not power to 
 give it to the Clergy ; therefore he will not be able to appoint 
 the Clergy. The Presbyter is only sealing (is only able to bap- 
 tize and give the Spirit to the Baptized in anointing him), the 
 Bishop shall ordain him. (Copt. Can. SS^.) 
 
Book II. The Constitution of the early Church. 35 
 
 V. That a Confessor needeth no Ordination to become Deacon 
 
 or Presbyter. 
 
 T) UT if the Confessor hath been in Bonds for the name of the 
 -'-^ Lord, they shall not lay hands on him for the service (of 
 Deacons), or for the office of Presbyter, for he hath the honour 
 of Eldership by his Confession. But if they will appoint him 
 for a Bishop, they shall lay hands on him. But if he is a Con- 
 fessor, he shall not have been taken in before the Authorities ; 
 neither shall he have been punished with Bonds ; neither shall 
 he have been cast into Prison ; neither shall he have been con- 
 demned in any Injustice. But according to the Word, because 
 he hath been reviled alone for the name of our Lord, and hath 
 been punished with Punishment in a House, and hath confessed, 
 he is worthy of every Sacerdotal Office from them, they shall 
 lay hands on him, and every one shall pray according to his 
 ability. But if he is able to pray suitably, and the Prayer 
 acceptable, it is good. But if, when he again prayeth, he 
 sendeth forth a Prayer in (a certain) measure, no one forbidding 
 him, let him only pray entirely in a right Faith. (Copt. Can. 
 34.) 
 
 VI. How a Reader is to be appointed. 
 
 rpHE Reader shall be appointed. The Bishop shall give him 
 -■- the Book of the Apostles, and shall pray over him, but he 
 shall not lay his hand upon him. (Copt Can. 35.) 
 
 D 2 
 
36 The Church- and House-Booh. 
 
 VII. How Widows are to he appointed. 
 
 BUT when a Widow is appointed, she shall not be ordained, 
 but she shall be chosen by Name ; and if her Husband 
 hath been dead for a long time, let her be appointed. But 
 if she hath not delayed from the Death of her Husband, 
 believe her not. But if she hath become old, let her be proved 
 for a time ; for often even the Passion long surviveth, and will 
 have place in them. 
 
 Let a Widow be appointed by Word only. She shall be 
 united with the rest. They shall not lay hands on her, because 
 she shall not put on the Eucharist, neither shall she per- 
 form Public Service. But Imposition of Hands shall be with 
 the Clergy for the Ministry. But the Widow is appointed for 
 Prayer, and that is of all. (Copt. Can. 37.) 
 
 ■# 
 
 VIII. How Virgins are to he appointed. 
 
 rpHERE shall be no Imposition of Hands on a Virgin ; for it 
 -*- is her Choice alone that maketh her a Virgin. (Copt. Can. 
 38.) 
 
 IX. What is to he done with him who hath the Gifts of Healing. 
 
 "TF one shall say, " I have received the Gifts of Healing by a 
 -*- revelation," they shall not lay hands on him ; for the thing 
 itself will be manifest if he speak truth. (Copt. Can. 39.) 
 
 #'^#' 
 
Book II. The Constitution of the early Church. 37 
 
 c. 
 
 THE THIRD SET 
 
 OF 
 
 ©rUinancts of tj^e (^Tj^urclb ot ^lexanUria usptcting 
 
 (Coptic Collection, fourth book.) 
 
 I. Hoiv a Bishop is to be elected, proved, and ordained. 
 
 TT is necessary that a Bishop should be ordained; first being 
 -^ chosen, being a holy Person, approved in all things, chosen 
 by all the People ; and when he hath been named and approved, 
 let all the People, and the Presbyters, and the honoured Bishops 
 assemble together on the Lord's Day, and let the principal 
 among them ask the Presbyters and all the People : " Is this 
 the Man whom ye desire for a Ruler ? " And if they shall say, 
 " Yes, this is he in truth," let him ask them again : " Do ye all 
 bear witness to him, that he is worthy of this great, honourable, 
 and holy Authority ? and whether he hath been pure in the 
 piety which he hath towards God ? And whether he observeth 
 justice towards all men ? And whether he governeth his own 
 house well ? And whether his whole life hath been blameless, 
 and he hath not been apprehended in any thing, neither those 
 of his house ? " 
 
 And if they all together have witnessed that he is such an 
 one according to the truth, and not according to favour, God 
 the Father, and his only-begotten son Jesus Christ our Lord, 
 and the Holy Spirit being judge that these things are so ; 
 let them be asked the third time, if he be worthy of this 
 
 D~3 
 
38 The Church- and House-Book. 
 
 great Service, of this Sacrifice, "That out of the mouth of 
 two or three witnesses every word may be established:" and 
 if they shall say the third time that he is worthy, let their 
 Votes be received from them all ; and when they have given 
 these cheerfully, let them be silent and quiet. And one of the 
 principal Bishops shall take with him two other Bishops, all the 
 Bishops standing near the Altar, praying in silence with the 
 Presbyters ; all the Deacons also holding the holy Gospels 
 spread open upon the head of him who is to be ordained, the 
 Bishop praying to God over him. And when he hath finished 
 praying over him, let one of the Bishops place the Oblation 
 upon the hands of him who is ordained, and let the Bishops 
 place him upon the Throne which becometh him. (Copt. Can. 
 
 II. How the Bishop is to ordain a Presbyter or Deacon. 
 
 TTTHEN thou, O Bishop, ordainest a. Presbyter, lay thy hand 
 ^ ' upon his head, all the Presbyters standing, and the Deacons 
 praying, ordaining him. Thou shalt also ordain the Deacon 
 according to this first Ordination. (Copt. Can. 67^) 
 
 •#• 
 
 III. How he is to appoint Subdeacons, and Readers, and Dea- 
 conesses. 
 
 A' 
 
 ND concerning the Subdeacons, and Readers, and Dea- 
 conesses, it is not necessary to ordain them. (Can. 67^) 
 
Book II. The Constitution of the early Church. 39 
 
 IV. That a Confessor needeth no Ordination, unless made a 
 
 Bishop. 
 
 /^RDAIN not the Confessor, for this thing is of his Choice 
 ^-^ and Patience ; for he is worthy of a great honour, as he 
 who hath confessed the name of God and his Son, before Kings 
 and Nations. But if there shall be occasion that he should be 
 made a Bishop, or a Presbyter, or a Deacon, let him be ordained. 
 (Can. 68^) 
 
 V. Against arrogant and presumptuous Confessors. 
 
 "FF a Confessor who hath not been ordained hath seized for 
 -^ himself the Dignity, on account of the Confession, let him 
 be anathematized ; for he is not one since he hath denied the 
 Command of Christ, and " hath become worse than an Infidel." 
 (Can. 68^) 
 
 VI. Virgins not to he ordained. 
 
 X ET not a Virgin be ordained, for we have no Command 
 ^-^ from the Lord. For this struggle is her choice, and is not 
 for the reproach of Marriage, but for the leisure of serving God. 
 (Can. 69.) 
 
 VII. Precautions in the Appointment of Widows. 
 
 A PFIDOTF shall not be ordained ; but if it is a great distance 
 -^-^ of time since her Husband died, and she has lived pru- 
 dently, and they have not found any fault against her, and she 
 
 D 4 
 
40 The Church- and House-Book. 
 
 has taken care of those of her house well, as Judith and Anna, 
 women of purity, let her be appointed to the order of Widows. 
 But if she hath not waited from the Death of her Husband 
 believe her not, but let her be proved by the time. For the 
 evil Passion remaineth in old Persons, with those who will 
 permit it a place in themselves, if it be not restrained with a 
 sharp Bridle. (Can. 70.) 
 
 VIII. Precautions as to Persons ivho have the Gift of Healing 
 the Possessed. 
 
 T^XORCISTS shall not be ordained, for the design is of the 
 J— J choice of the will, and of the grace of God, and Christ 
 Jesus. When the Holy Spirit is manifested in the man he will 
 receive the Gift of Healing ; it is made manifest by the reve- 
 lation of God, by the grace of God which is in him, giving light 
 to all men. But if there be a necessity that he should be a 
 Bishop, or Presbyter, or Deacon, let him be ordained. (Can. 71.) 
 
 IX. Additional Ordinance as to the case of a Bishop having been 
 ordained by one Bishop only. 
 
 TT is necessary that a Bishop should be ordained by three, or 
 -■- two. Bishops ; but if one Bishop hath ordained him let him 
 be anathematized. But if a necessity hath happened to any one 
 that he should be ordained by one only, because they are not 
 able to gather together on account of the Persecution which 
 is without, or on account of any other such like cause, let the 
 Permission from many other holy Bishops be received for doing 
 this, which is requisite for him. (Can. 72.) 
 
Book II. The Constitution of the early Church. 41 
 
 X. General Definitio^is of the peculiar Right and Power of the 
 different Members of the Clergy. 
 
 rpHE Bishop blesseth, but is not blessed. He ordaineth, layeth 
 -^ on hands upon men, putteth on the Oblation, receiveth the 
 Blessing from the Bishops, but not from the Presbyters. The 
 Bishop anathematizeth (excludeth) every Clergyman who de- 
 serveth to be anathematized (excluded) ; but to another Bishop 
 he is without power to do this alone. 
 
 A Presbyter also blesseth and receiveth the Blessing from 
 his fellow-Presbyter and from the Bishop ; and he likewise 
 giveth it to his fellow-Presbyter. He layeth his hands on men, 
 but he doth not ordain, neither doth he anathematize. He 
 putteth out those who are under him ; and if there are any 
 deserving of Punishment, let him give it them. 
 
 A Deacon doth not bless, neither doth he give the Blessing, 
 but he receiveth it from the Bishop and the Presbyter. He 
 doth not baptize, neither doth he put on the Eucharist. But 
 when the Bishop and the Presbyter have set on the Eucharist, 
 the Deacon giveth the Cup, not as a Priest, but as one who 
 ministereth to the Priests. There is no power in any other of 
 the Clergy to do the work of a Deacon. 
 
 And a Deaconess doth not bless, neither doth she do any of 
 those things which the Presbyters and the Deacons do, but she 
 keepeth the Doors only, and ministereth to the Presbyters at 
 the time of the Baptism of Women, because this is becoming. 
 
 A Deacon can put out the Subdeacon, and the Readers, and 
 the Singer, and the Deaconesses, if occasion leads him, no 
 Presbyter indeed being there. A Subdeacon has no power to 
 put out a Reader, or a Singer, or a Deaconess, or a Lay 
 Person, for he is a Minister to the Deacons. (Can. 73.) 
 
42 The Church- and House-Booh. 
 
 APPENDIX. 
 
 The Requisites and Duties of a Bishop, according to the Third 
 Book of the Greek Apostolical Constitutions. 
 
 A PASTOR who is to be ordained a Bishop in any Parish must 
 be unblamable, unreprovable, free from all kinds of wickedness 
 common among men, not under fifty years of age. . . . But if in a 
 small Parish one advanced in years is not to be found, let some 
 younger Person who hath a good report among his Neighbours, and 
 is esteemed by them worthy of the office of a Bishop, . . . after 
 Examination and a general good Report be ordained in peace . . . 
 
 Let not a Bishop be given to filthy lucre, especially before the 
 Gentiles, rather suffering than offering injuries, not covetous nor 
 rapacious, no purloiner, no admirer nor hater of the poor, no evil- 
 speaker nor false witness, not given to anger, no brawler, not 
 entangled with the affairs of this life, not a surety for any one, nor 
 an accuser in suits about money, not ambitious, not double-minded 
 nor double-tongued, not ready to hearken to calumny or evil- 
 speaking, not a dissembler, not addicted to the heathen festivals, not 
 given to vain deceits, not eager after worldly things nor a lover of 
 money. For all these things are opposed to God, and pleasing to 
 Demons. . . . 
 
 Rebuke, O Bishop, those that sin, admonish those that are not con- 
 verted, exhort those that stand to persevere in their goodness ; 
 receive the Penitent, for the Lord God hath promised with an oath 
 to grant remission to the Penitent for what things they have done 
 amiss. . . . Condemn the guilty Person with authority, afterwards 
 try to bring him home with mercy and compassion and readiness to 
 receive him, promising him salvation, if he will change his course of 
 life . . . 
 
Book II. The Constitution of the early Church. 43 
 
 Do not admit less Evidence to convict any one than that of 
 Three Witnesses, and those of known and established reputations. 
 
 Let the Bishop use those Tithes and First-fruits which are given 
 according to the command of God^ as a man of God; as also, let 
 him dispense in a right manner the free-will Offerings, which are 
 brought in on account of the Poor, the Orphans, the Widows, the 
 Afflicted and Strangers in distress, as having that God for the 
 examiner of his accounts, who hath committed the disposition to him. 
 Distribute to all those in want with Righteousness ; and yourselves 
 use the things which belong to the Lord, but do not abuse them ; 
 eating of them, but not eating them all up by yourselves; com- 
 municate with those that are in want, and thereby show yourselves 
 unblamable before God. (Third Book, ch. 20. extract.) 
 
 •#• 
 
 B. 
 
 On the Marriage of the Clergy. 
 
 A BISHOP, a Presbyter, and a Deacon, when they are constituted, 
 must be but once married, whether their Wives be alive, or 
 whether they be dead ; and it is not lawful for them, if they are 
 unmarried when they are ordained, to be married afterwards ; or if 
 they be then married, to marry a second time, but to be content with 
 that Wife which they had when they came to Ordination. We also 
 appoint that the Ministers and Singers and Readers and Porters shall 
 be only once married. But if they entered into the Clergy before 
 they were married, we permit them to marry, if they have an 
 inclination thereto, lest they sin and incur Punishment. But we do 
 not permit any one of the Clergy to take to wife either an Whore or 
 a Servant or a Widow, or one that is divorced, as also the Law says. 
 Let the Deaconess be a pure Virgin, or at least a Widow who 
 hath been but once married, faithful and well esteemed, (vi. 17.) 
 
THIRD BOOK. 
 
 OB, 
 
 THE CHRISTIAN SACRIFICE AND WORSHIP OF 
 THE ANCIENT CHURCH. 
 
 e¥>^-^ 
 
 THIS BOOK CONTAINETH: 
 
 A. The Liturgy, or the General Order of the Service. 
 
 First Part: Preparatory Service (Service of the Catechumens). 
 Second Part : Service of the Believers, or Service of Thanks- 
 giving (Eucharist). 
 
 B. Some recorded early Forms of Thanksgiving. 
 
 I. The Hymn of Thanksgiving, or the Morning Hymn of the 
 early Church. 
 
 1. According to the Alexandrian Manuscript of the Bible. 
 
 Also called Hymnus Angelicus. 
 
 2. The same reduced to its primitive Form. 
 
 II. The Morning Psalm (Ps. Ixiii.), or the Morning Verse 
 between Psalm Verses. 
 
 III. The Evening Psalm (Ps. xli.), or the Song of Simeon, or the 
 
 Christian Psalm composed of Psalm Verses. 
 
 IV. The Evening Hymn of the Greek Christians. 
 
 V. The Evening Hymn of the Apostolic Constitutions. 
 
 APPENDIX. 
 
 I. A Form of Prayer of Thanksgiving before the Communion. 
 
 II. A Form of Thanksgiving after the Communion. 
 
isoofe m. 
 
 A. 
 
 ®fie Hiturgg, or tf)e CEfeneral OxHtx of i\iz ^txbitt. 
 
 FIRST PART. 
 
 Preparatory Service, or Service of tbe Catechumens. 
 
 Accessible also to the Hearers, who are learning the Word, but have not yet taken 
 the Sacred Pledge, and therefore do not belong to the Communion of the 
 BeUevers. 
 
 A Psalm of the Old (or New ?) Testament sung in the antiphonic Manner 
 
 of the Hebrew poetry, according to Hemistichs. 
 Or also an Act of Humiliation and Confession. 
 The Doxology, or the Praise, at the end of a Psalm : 
 
 Glory he to the Father, and to the Son, and to the Holy Ghost, 
 for ever and ever. Amen, 
 
 Or, 
 
 Glory he to the Father, and to the Son, with the Holy Ghost, 
 for ever and ever. Amen. 
 
 Or, 
 
 Glory he to the Father in (or through) the Son, and through the 
 Holy Ghost, for ever and ever. Amen. 
 
48 The Church- and Hoiise-Book. 
 
 A Canticle of the Old Testament. 
 Or a Christian Hymn or Sacred Song. 
 Lesson from the Old Testament. 
 Lesson from the New Testament. 
 
 Homily, or Explanation of Scripture, especially of the Gospel, and Exhorta- 
 tions to Christian Faith and Life. 
 Dismissal of the Catechumens or Hearers, with Blessing. 
 
 SECOND PART. 
 
 The Service of the Believers, or Service of Thanksqivino {Eucharist). 
 
 The Oblation, or Placing of Bread and Wine (and First-fruits) on the 
 
 Communion Table. 
 Generally a Word of Admonition premised, as : 
 
 No Profane ! 
 Wisdom ! 
 
 The mutual Salutation of Bishop (or Presbyters) and People : 
 The Lord be with you : 
 A7id ivith thy Spirit. 
 
 The Preface, or Introduction to the Thanksgiving for the Gifts of God and 
 for Christ's Redemption : 
 
 Lift up your Hearts : 
 
 We lift them up unto the Lord. 
 Let us give thanks unto the Lord : 
 
 It is meet and right so to do. 
 
 The Prayer of Thanksgiving : either only 
 
 The Lord's Prayer, 
 to which, for that purpose, the following Doxology or concluding Praise 
 was added, with the usual Response : 
 
 For Thine is the Kingdom, and the Power, and the Glory, for 
 ever and ever. 
 
Book III. A. The Liturgy. 49 
 
 [Or, 
 For Thine is the Power for ever and ever.] 
 Amen. 
 
 Or, besides, a free Prayer of the Bishop or Elder, praising God's Benefits 
 from the Creation of the World, and asking his Blessing for the 
 Communicants. 
 
 (The Words of the Institution formed no necessary part of this 
 Prayer of Consecration, but may have been historically recited.) 
 The Communion of all the Believers present, taken both in the Bread and 
 in the Cup. 
 
 Antiphonic Verses used before the Communion, according to the Custom of the Church, 
 
 The Cherubic Hymn, or Trisagion, from Isaiah : 
 Holy, holy, holy, is the Lord the God of Sabaoth. 
 
 Heaven and Earth are full of Thy Glory. 
 After this Verse, or perhaps originally instead of it, was sung : 
 The Hymn of Thanksgiving^ or the Morning Hymn. 
 (See the text at the head of the Hymns.) 
 
 Other Antiphonic Verses used before the Communion : 
 
 Hosanna to the Son of David : 
 
 Blessed he he who cometh in the Name of the Lord. 
 
 God is the Lord : 
 
 IFho was made matiifest to us in the Flesh. 
 
 Or, Exhortations and Admonitions to the Congregation : 
 He who is holy, let him draw near : 
 
 If he is not, let him become so through Penitence. 
 
 Or, 
 
 This is Maranatha ! (the Lord cometh !) 
 
 After the Communion. 
 
 Prayer of Thanksgiving, for the Benefit and Grace received (sometimes the 
 
 Lord's Prayer with Doxology used at this place). 
 The Dismissal of the Congregation with the Blessing. 
 
 VOL. II. 
 
50 The Church- and House-Book. 
 
 B. 
 
 W^t t£CotM earlg ii^gmns anU Jporms of ^j^anfesgibing. 
 
 I. The Hymn of Thanksgivini;, or the Morning Hymn of the early Church. 
 
 1 . According to the Alexandrian Manuscinpt of the Bible : also called Hymnvs 
 
 Angelicus. 
 
 GLORY be to God on high, and on Earth Peace, good Will 
 among Men. We praise Thee, we bless Thee, we worship 
 Thee : we give thanks to Thee for Thy great Glory ; O Lord, 
 heavenly King, God the Father Almighty ! O Lord, the only- 
 begotten Son Jesus Christ ; and the Holy Ghost, O Lord God ! 
 O Lamb of God ! Son of the Father, that takest away the Sins 
 of the World, have Mercy upon us. Thou that takest away 
 the Sins of the World, have Mercy upon us, receive our Prayer. 
 Thou that sittest at the right hand of God the Father, have 
 Mercy upon us. For Thou only art holy : Thou only the Lord, 
 Jesus Christ, to the Glory of God the Father. Amen. 
 
 •#• 
 
 2. The same reduced to its primitive Form. 
 
 GLORY be to God on high : 
 And on Earth Peace, good Will among Men. 
 [Or, perhaps more primitively : 
 Jnd on Earth Peace among the Men of good Will.'] 
 
 We praise Thee, we bless Thee, we worship Thee, 
 We give Thanhs to Thee for Thy great Glory. 
 
 O Lord heavenly King, God the Father Almighty : 
 Lord God ! 
 
Book III. B. Early Hymns. 51 
 
 O Lord, the only-begotten Son : 
 
 Jesus Christ ! 
 That takest away the Sins of the World : 
 
 Have Mercy upon us. 
 Thou that takest away the Sins of the World : 
 
 Have Mercy upon us, receive our Prayer. 
 Thou that sittest at the right hand of God the Father : 
 
 Have Mercy upon us. 
 
 For thou only art Holy : 
 
 TJiou only art the Lord, Jesus Christ : 
 To the Glory of God the Father. Amen, 
 
 •#• 
 
 II. The Morning Psalm (Ps. Ixiii.), or the following Morning Verse between 
 
 Psalm Verses : 
 
 "PVERY day will I bless Thee : 
 -^—* And I will bless Thy Name for ever and ever. 
 Vouchsafe, O Lord, to keep us this Day without Sin. 
 Blessed art Thou, O Lord God of our Fathers : 
 
 And thy Name be praised and glorified for ever and ever. 
 Amen. 
 
 I IF. The Evening Psalm (Ps. xli.), or the Song of Simeon, or the following Psalm 
 composed of Psalm Verses : 
 
 BLESSED art thou, O Lord, teach me Thy Statutes. 
 Lord, Thou hast been our Dwelling-place in all Gene- 
 rations. 
 I said. Lord, be merciful unto me : 
 
 Heal my Soul, for I have sinned against Thee. 
 Lord, I flee unto Thee to hide me. 
 
52 Tlie Church- and House-Book. 
 
 Teach me to do Thy Will : 
 
 For thou art my God. 
 For with Thee is the Fountain of Life : 
 
 In Thy Light shall we see Light. 
 O continue thy Loving-kindness unto them that know Thee. 
 
 •#■ 
 
 IV. The Evening Hymn of the Greek Christians. 
 
 HERENE Light of holy Glory, 
 
 ^ Of the Father everlasting, Jesus Christ ! 
 
 Having come to the Setting of the Sun, 
 
 And seeing the Evening Light, 
 
 We praise the Father and the Son 
 
 And the Holy Spirit of God. 
 
 It behoveth to praise Thee 
 
 At all Times with holy Songs, 
 
 Son of God who hast given Life, 
 
 Therefore the World glorifieth Thee. 
 
 #• 
 
 V. The Evening Hymn of the Apostolic Constitutions. 
 
 PRAISE, ye Servants, the Lord : 
 Praise the Name of the Lord. 
 We praise Thee, we sing unto Thee, we bless Thee : 
 
 On account of Thy great Glory. 
 O Lord the King, Father of Christ : 
 
 Of the spotless Lamb, wliich taketh away the Sins of the World. 
 It behoveth to praise Thee : 
 
 It behoveth to sing unto Thee. 
 It behoveth to glorify Thee, God and Father : 
 
 Through the Son, in the Holy Ghost, for ever and ever. Amen. 
 
Book III. Liturgical Formularies. 53 
 
 APPENDIX 
 
 FEOM 
 
 THE SEVENTH BOOK OF THE GKEEK CONSTITUTIONS. 
 
 HiturQical jpormularies. 
 
 I. A Form of Prayer of Thanksgiving before the Communion, 
 
 WE thank Thee, our Father, for that Life which Thou hast made 
 known to us by Jesus thy Son, by whom Thou madest all 
 things, and takest care of the whole World ; whom Thou hast sent to 
 become Man for our Salvation ; whom Thou hast permitted to suffer 
 and to die ; whom Thou hast raised up, and been pleased to glorify, 
 and hast set down on Thy right hand : by whom Thou hast promised 
 us the Resurrection of the Dead. Do Thou, O Lord Almighty, 
 Everlasting God, so gather together Thy Church from the ends of 
 the Earth into Thy Kingdom, as this (Corn) was once scattered, and 
 is now become one Loaf. We also, our Father, thank Thee for the 
 precious Blood of Jesus Christ, which was shed for us, and for His 
 precious Body, whereof we celebrate this Eepresentation, as Himself 
 appointed us, to shew forth his Death, For, through Him, Glory is 
 to be given to Thee for ever. Amen. 
 
 II. A Form of thanksgiving after the Communion. 
 
 WE thank Thee, God and Father of Jesus our Saviour, for 
 Thy Holy Name, which Thou hast made to inhabit among us ; 
 and that Knowledge, Faith, Love, and Immortality, which Thou 
 hast given us through Thy Son Jesus. Thou, O Almighty Lord, the 
 God of the Universe, hast created the World, and the things that 
 
 E 3 
 
54 The Church- and House-Book. 
 
 are therein by Him ; and hast planted a Law in our Souls, and 
 beforehand didst prepare things for the convenience of Men. O God 
 of our holy and blameless Fathers, Abraham and Isaac and Jacob, 
 Thy faithful Servants; Thou, O God, who art powerful, faithful, 
 and true, and without Deceit in Thy Promises; who didst send upon 
 Earth Jesus Thy Christ to converse with Men, as a Man, when he 
 was God, the Word, and Man, to take away error by the roots ; do 
 Thou, even now, through Him, be mindful of this Thy Holy Church, 
 which Thou hast purchased with the precious Blood of Thy Christ, 
 and deliver it from all Evil, and perfect it in Thy Love and Thy 
 Truth, and gather us all together into Thy Kingdom which Thou 
 hast prepared. Amen. 
 
 •#!^^# 
 
FOURTH BOOK. 
 
 Unlc^ of ^cmvsLl CTontiuct 
 
 ALL MEMBERS OE THE CONGREGATION : 
 
 OR, 
 
 THE CONGREGATIONAL, SOCIAL, AND DOMESTIC LIFE OF THE 
 EARLY CHRISTIANS. 
 
 THIS BOOK CONTAINETH: 
 
 First Chapter: Regulation of Christian Life respecting the 
 Worship and Service. — From the Seventh Book of the Greek 
 Constitutions. 
 
 I. That the Christians are to fast in the Holy Week, but keep the 
 other Sabbaths as Festivals. 
 
 II. On the Celebration of the Lord's Day. 
 
 III. That the Believers alone are to partake of the Eucharist. 
 
 IV. How far Presbyters coming from other Churches are to be 
 
 allowed to say the Thanksgiving. 
 
 Second Chapter : Rules of Christian Conduct in the Love-Feasts 
 and other social 3Ieetings, and in domestic Life. 
 I. That the Bishop is always to be ready to take Bread and 
 Wine in the Church with any one of the Faithful who 
 wishes it. 
 II. How the Christians are to behave in their Love-Feasts. 
 
 III. How one of the Widows may take part in a Love-Feast. 
 
 E 4 
 
TV. How the Christian is to begin his Day-work by Prayer, and 
 by hearing the Word of God, and take the Communion, if 
 there is a Place of Christian Meeting. 
 V. The same Ordinance amplified. 
 VI. That every Believer is to take the Communion at the Dawn 
 of Day, and how. 
 VII. How the Christian is to edify himself in his own House. 
 VIII. At what hours and with Avhat Meditations the Christian is to 
 pray, Morning, Forenoon, Noon, Afternoon, Evening, and 
 Middle of the Night. 
 IX. What is the Meaning of the Christian signing himself with 
 the Sign of the Cross. 
 X. Injunction on the Praying of the Lord's Prayer. (From the 
 
 Greek Constitutions.) 
 XI. On private and public Devotion. (From the Fifth Book of 
 
 the Coptic Canons.) 
 XII. On what Days Christians are to celebrate the Commemoration 
 of the Dead. 
 
 XIII. How Presbyters and Deacons are to behave at the Funeral 
 
 Meals. 
 
 XIV. How Cemeteries and Burials are to be arranged. 
 
 XV. That Christians ought to abstain from eating sacrificial Meat. 
 XVI. How many Days the Servants are to work. 
 
 APPENDIX. 
 Oa Conjugal Life and on Impurities. 
 
 ■^m^ 
 
((uC?/\ ""-^^-^jsj-^ yya/<(-S>9r\ y^-&=S^:i. /fSM/K ?^«=jg^^ ^f^^,,^^^T& r5#«-5Cs*r-* /!!? 
 
 misMii^s^ 
 
 ^ 
 
 JSooR m. 
 
 FIRST CHAPTER. 
 
 REGULATION OF CHRISTIAN LIFE RESPECTING THE WORSHIT 
 AND SERVICE. 
 
 (From the Seventh Book of the Greek Constitutions.) 
 
 I. That the Christians are to fast in the Holy Week, hut keep 
 the Sabbath as a Festival, excej^t Easter-Eve. 
 
 (;»:2^4^^®\(®ET not your Fasts be with the Hypocrites; for 
 (ii^ t^'i they fast on the second and fifth days of tlie 
 IfiS^/ (Holy) week. But do you either fast the entire 
 '^/ll^ Five Days (Monday to Friday in the Holy Week), 
 or on the Fourth Day of the Week, and on the 
 Day of the Preparation (Wednesday and Friday of the Holy 
 Week). Because on the fourth day the Condemnation went 
 out against the Lord, Judas then promising to betray him for 
 money; and you must fast on the Day of the Preparation, 
 because on that day the Lord suffered the death of the Cross, 
 under Pontius Pilate. But keep the Sabbath and the Lord's 
 Day Festival ; because the former is the memorial of the 
 Creation, and the latter of the Resurrection. But there is one 
 only Sabbath to be observed by you in the whole year, which 
 is that of our Lord's Burial, on which men ought to keep a 
 Fast, but not a Festival. For inasmuch as the Creator was 
 
58 The Church- and House-Book. 
 
 then under the earth, the sorrow for him is more forcible than 
 the joy for the Creation : for the Creator is more honourable 
 by nature and dignity than his own Creatures, (vii. 23.) 
 
 11. On the Celebration of the Lord's Day. 
 
 ON the Day of the Resurrection of the Lord, that is the 
 Lord's Day, assemble yourselves together, without fail, 
 giving thanks to God and praising him for those mercies He 
 has bestowed upon you, through Christ ; and for that He has 
 delivered you from ignorance, error, and bondage ; that your 
 Sacrifice may be unspotted, and acceptable to God, who has 
 said concerning his Universal Church : " In every place shall 
 Incense and a pure Sacrifice he offered unto me ; for I am a 
 great King, saith the Lord Almighty, and my name is wonderful 
 among the Heathen." (vii. 30.) 
 
 •#• 
 
 IIL That the Faithful alone are to 'partake of the Eucharist. 
 
 T ET no one eat of these things that is not initiated ; but 
 -'-^ those only who have been baptized into the death of the 
 Lord. But if any one that is not initiated conceal himself and 
 partake of the same, " He eateth eternal Damnation ; " because 
 being not of the faith of Christ he has partaken of such things 
 as it is not lawful for him to partake of, to his own punishment. 
 But if any one is a Partaker through Ignorance, instruct him 
 quickly, and initiate him, that he may not go out and despise 
 you. (vii. 25.) 
 
Book IV. Rules of General Conduct. 59 
 
 IV. How far Presbyters coming from other Churches are to he 
 allowed to say the Thanksgiving, 
 
 WHOSOEVER being a Presbyter cometh to you and giveth 
 thanks in a Christian manner, receive him as a Disciple 
 of Christ. But if he preach another Doctrine, different from 
 that which Christ has delivered to you, such an one you must 
 not permit to give thanks ; for such an one rather affronteth 
 God than glorifieth him. But whosoever cometh to you, let 
 him be first examined, and then received, for ye have Under- 
 standing, and are able to know the right hand from the left, 
 and to distinguish false Teachers from true Teachers. But 
 when a Teacher cometh to you, supply him with what he 
 wanteth in all readiness. And even when a false Teacher 
 cometh, you shall give him for his necessity, but shall not receive 
 his error. Nor indeed may ye pray together with him, lest ye 
 be polluted as well as he. Every true Prophet or Teacher that 
 cometh to you is worthy of his maintenance, as being a Labourer 
 in the Word of Righteousness, (vii. 28.) 
 
60 The Church- and House-Book. 
 
 SECOND CHAPTER. 
 
 KULES OF CHRISTIAN CONDUCT IN THE LOVE-FEASTS AND OTHER 
 SOCIAL MEETINGS, AND IN DOMESTIC LIFE. 
 
 I. That the Bishop is always to he ready to take Bread and 
 Wine in the Church with any one Believer who wisheth it. 
 
 T ET "Widows and Virgins fast often, and let them pray in 
 ■^ the Church ; likewise the Presbyters and the Laity, let 
 them fast when they will. But the Bishop is not able to fast 
 except on the day that all the People fast. For it may be that 
 some one may wish to take something in the Church, and it is 
 not possible for him to deny. And if he break the Bread at all, 
 he will taste the Bread, and eat it, and the rest of the Believers 
 with him. Let them receive from the hand of the Bishop a 
 portion of the same Bread, before eacli one shall divide the 
 Bread which is for him ; for this is a Blessing and is not a 
 Thanksgiving, like the body of the Lord. (Copt. Coll. book ii. 
 can. 47.) 
 
 IL How Christians are to behave in their Love-Feasts. 
 
 TT become th every one before he drink to take the Cup and 
 -*- give thanks over it, that he may drink and eat with purity. 
 And thus let them give to the Catechumens of the Bread of 
 Exorcism, and a Cup. (Can. 48.) 
 
 And let those who eat remember him who has called them, as 
 often as they eat. For on this account he constrained them, 
 that they should come in under his roof. (Can. 49.) 
 
Book IV. Rules of General Conduct. 61 
 
 And when ye eat and drink in tranquillity, drink not that ye 
 may be drunken, that men may deride you, and he who has 
 called you is sorrowful for your Dissoluteness. But that he 
 shall pray the Saints (Believers) to go in to him ; for he has 
 said, " Ye are the Salt of the Earth." 
 
 If they have given to you all the Portions together, thou 
 shalt come bearing thy Part alone. And when you have been 
 called to eat, you shall eat only what sufficeth you, for as to 
 what remaineth, he who has called you shall do with it what he 
 pleaseth, so that it remaineth for the Believers, and he will 
 rejoice in your entering in to him. 
 
 And those who have been called shall surely eat, but let them 
 eat in peace, and not contentiously. And if the Bishop should 
 command any one to seek for a word, let him answer him. 
 And if the Bishop has spoken, let every one be silent with 
 attention, until he interrogateth him again. And if a Bishop 
 be not there, but the Believers alone are at the Supper, let them 
 receive the Blessing from the Presbyter, if he be there, but if 
 he be not there, let them receive it from a Deacon. Likewise 
 that the Catechumen receive the Bread of Exorcism. The 
 Laity being by themselves without a Clergyman, let them eat 
 with moderation, but the Layman cannot give the Blessing. 
 (Can. 50.) 
 
 And let each one eat with Thanksgiving, in the name of God, 
 for this is proper for the Servant of God, that we all should be 
 watchful, and the Gentiles will emulate us. (Can. 5L) 
 
 #■ 
 
 III. How one of the Widoivs may take part in a Love-Feast. 
 
 "TF any one desireth for a time to call the Widows, let him feed 
 -*- every one who is become old, and send them away before 
 the Evening cometh. And if it be not possible for the Clergy- 
 
62 The Church- and House-Book. 
 
 man to whom they have ministered to come, let him give 
 them Wine and something to eat, and they shall eat in their 
 own House, as they will. (Can. 52.) 
 
 ■#• 
 
 IV. How the Christian is to begin Ms Day-work hy Prayer and 
 by heariyig the Word of God and taking the Communion, if 
 there is a Place of Christian Meeting. 
 
 T ET all Believers when they shall wake up, before they put 
 -'-^ their hand to any Work, pray to the Lord, and thus let 
 them approach their Work. 
 
 And when there shall be a Word of Instruction let them 
 prefer it greatly to go to hear the Word of God for the 
 edification of their Souls. And let them hasten that they may 
 go into the Church, the place in which the Spirit quickeneth. 
 (Coptic Coll. book ii. can. 57.) 
 
 •#■ 
 
 V. The same Ordinance amplified. 
 
 A ND all Believers, men and women, when they have 
 -^--*- risen in the morning from sleep, before they touch any 
 Work, let them wash their hands, and they shall pray to God, 
 and thus let them proceed to their Work. 
 
 And when it cometh to pass that there shall be an Exhort- 
 ation of the Word of God, let every one choose for himself to 
 go to that place, reckoning this in his heart, that he has heard 
 God speaking in the Exhortation, for praying in the Church 
 will prevail. For when the Darkness of the day is passed by, 
 let the timid reckon that it is a great Sin if he go not to the 
 place in which they exhort ; and especially he who is able to 
 read. Or when the Teacher cometh, let not any one of you be 
 
Book IV. Rules of General Conduct. 63 
 
 last in the Church, the place in which they instruct. Then it 
 shall be given to him who speaketh that he shall declare things 
 useful to every one, and thou shalt hear the things thou thinkest 
 not, and thou shalt profit by those things which the Holy Spirit 
 shall give to thee by the Exhortation ; and thus thy Faith shall 
 be established by those things which thou hast heard. And 
 they shall speak to thee again in that place of those things 
 which it becometh thee to do in thy house. Therefore let every 
 one hasten to go into the Church, the place where the Holy 
 Spirit stirs up. (Can. 62*.) 
 
 VI. That every faithful Person is to take the Communion at the 
 Dawn of Day, and how. 
 
 A ND let every Believer hasten to partake of the Eucharist 
 -^--*- before he tasteth of any other thing. 
 
 Let every one take care by investigation that no Unbeliever 
 eateth of the Eucharist ; nor a mouse, nor other creature ; or 
 that any other thing indeed has fallen into it which has strayed. 
 This is the Body of Christ which all Believers partake of, and 
 it is not becoming to despise it. 
 
 For if thou hast blessed the Cup in the name of God, and 
 hast partaken of it, like as of the Blood of Christ, keep thyself 
 with the greatest care : spill not of it, lest a strange Spirit 
 should lick it up, that God may not be angry with thee as one 
 who has despised it, and thou shalt be guilty of the Blood of 
 Christ by thy contempt of the price by which thou wast 
 purchased. 
 
 Let the Deacons and the Presbyters assemble daily in the 
 place in which the Bishops shall command them ; and the 
 Deacons shall not be negligent in assembling to see to all 
 things, unless Sickness hinder them. When they have collected 
 all, let them make the distribution to those in the Church. 
 
64 The Church- and House-Booh. 
 
 And thus when they have prayed let each one proceed to the 
 employment appointed him. (Copt'ic Collection, book ii. can. 
 57—60.) 
 
 •#• 
 
 VII. How the Christian is to edify himself in his oivn House. 
 
 WHEN there is a day in which there is no Exhortation, let 
 every one being in his House take a holy Book, reading 
 in it sufficiently what appeareth to him useful. (Can. 62^) 
 
 ■#• 
 
 VIII. At what Hours and with what Meditations the Christian 
 is to pray, Morning, Forenoon, Noon, Afternoon, 
 Evening, and Middle of the Night. 
 
 AND if thou art in thy House, pray at the Third Hour, 
 blessing God. But if thou art in another place having 
 opportunity at that time, pray in thy heart to God ; for in that 
 hour they saw Christ nailed to the Wood. Therefore, also, in 
 the old Law it is commanded that they should put on the 
 Shewbread continually, the Type of the Body and Blood of 
 Christ. He also is the Bread which came down from Heaven. 
 
 Pray again likewise at the Sixth Hour; for when they 
 crucified Christ on the Wood of the Cross that Day was 
 divided, and there was great Darkness. Wherefore let them 
 pray at that time with a fervent Prayer, availing themselves of 
 the voice of Him who prayed (at that hour) causing all Creation 
 to be dark, by reason of the unbelief of the Jews. 
 
 Let them pray again a great Prayer and a great Praise at the 
 Ninth Hour ; for thou shalt be enlightened like the Souls of 
 the righteous who blessed the Lord God of truth. He who 
 remembered the Saints, sent to them his Son, who is his Word, 
 
Book IV. Rtdes of Getieral Conduct. 65 
 
 who enlightened them. For in that hour the Side of Christ 
 was pierced with a Spear, and Blood and Water came out ; and 
 afterwards it was light the remaining part of the Day until the 
 evening. Therefore thou also, if thou hast gone to thy rest, 
 thou art to remember another Day, and realize the type of the 
 Resurrection. 
 
 Pray again before thou restest thyself upon the Bed of thy 
 repose. 
 
 And if thou hast risen at Midnight upon thy Bed, wash thy 
 hands and pray ; but thou shalt wash thy hands in pure water. 
 And if thou hast a "Wife pray together with one another. But 
 if she has not yet believed, thou shalt withdraw thyself into a 
 place and shalt pray alone, and return again to thy place. But 
 thou who art bound in Marriage refrain not from Prayer, for 
 thou art not defiled. For those who are washed, have no need 
 to wash again, for they are purified and are clean. And if thou 
 breathest in thy hand, sealing thyself with the Vapour which 
 shall come out of thy Mouth, thou shalt be all clean, to thy 
 foot, for this is the Gift of the Holy Spirit. And the Drops of 
 Water are the baptismal Drops coming up from the fountain, 
 that is, the heart of the Believer, purifying him who believeth. 
 
 There is a necessity again that Prayers should be made at 
 that hour : for the Elders, they who delivered this work to us, 
 likewise taught us thus to purify ourselves ; for in that hour all 
 Creation is silent, praising God. The stars and the trees and 
 the waters are as all the host of Angels who stand around, 
 serving with the Souls of the Just, praising God Almighty at 
 that time. Therefore it becometh Believers to pray at that 
 hour. The Lord again has spoken after this manner, witnessing 
 to this, saying : " /» the middle of the night behold there was a 
 cry, Behold the bridegroom cometh, come ye out to meet him." 
 And he interpreted the Word again, saying : " Watch, there- 
 fore, because ye know not the day neither the hour when the Son 
 of Man cometh.'" Likewise if thou shalt rise at the time of the 
 Cock-crowing, pray, because the Children of Israel denied 
 Christ at that hour. This we have known who believe on him 
 
 VOL. II. F 
 
66 The Church- and House-Book. 
 
 by Faith, looking for the hope of the Day of Light for ever, 
 which shall enlighten us for ever in the Resurrection of 
 the Dead. 
 
 And all ye Believers, if ye fulfil these things, and remember 
 that ye teach one another, and instruct the Catechumens to 
 perform them, nothing shall try you, and ye shall not mourn 
 for ever. (Can. 62^) 
 
 IX. What is the Meaning of the Christian signing himself with 
 the Sign of the Cross, 
 
 "O EMEMBER Christ continually, and receive this name at 
 -*-^ all times, sealing thy Forehead in fear, for this is the 
 Sign which is known and manifest, and by this the Devil is 
 ruined. If thou hast done it in Faith thou art not only known 
 before men, but thou hast the knowledge that it is a Sign. 
 For the Adversary the Devil looks to the power of the heart 
 only ; and if he seeth the inner Man that is rational, sealed 
 within and without with the Seal of the "Word of God, he 
 fleeth immediately, fleeing from him through the Holy Spirit 
 which is in the Man, who has granted him a place in himself. 
 This also Moses the Prophet first taught us by the Passover. 
 For he commanded that they should sprinkle the Blood of the 
 Lamb which had been killed, upon the Lintel and the two 
 Door-posts, showing to us the Faith which is now in us, which 
 was given to us by the perfect Lamb. If we have sealed our- 
 selves with this on our Foreheads, with our hands, we shall be 
 delivered from those who wish to destroy us. 
 
 And if ye receive these things with Thanksgiving and a right 
 Faith, ye shall be sanctified, and received into eternal Life. 
 (Can. 62^) 
 
 ■#■ 
 
Book IV. Rules of General Conduct. 67 
 
 X. Injunction on the Praying of the Lord's Prayer. — From the 
 Greek Constitutions. 
 
 TT 7^ HEN ye pray, he not ye as the Hypocrites, but as the 
 r r Lord has appointed us in the Gospel, so pray ye : Our 
 Father which art in heaven ; hallowed he thy Name ; thy King- 
 dom come ; thy Will he done as in heaven, so on earth ; give us 
 this Day our daily Bread; and forgive us our Dehts, as we for- 
 give our Dehtors ; and lead us not into Temptation, hut deliver 
 us from Evil ; for thine is the Kingdom for ever. Amen. Pray 
 thus thrice in a day, preparing yourselves beforehand, that ye 
 may be worthy of the adoption of the Father ; lest when ye call 
 him Father unworthily, ye be reproached by him, as Israel his 
 first-born Son was once told : If I he a Father, where is my 
 Glory ? and if I he a Lord, where is my Fear ? For the Glory 
 of Fathers is the Holiness of their Children ; and the Honour 
 of Masters is the Fear of their Servants, as the contrary is 
 dishonour and confusion : for, saith he. Through you my name 
 is hlasphemed among the Gentiles, (vii. 24.) 
 
 XI. On Private and Fuhlic Devotion. — From the Fifth Book 
 of the Coptic Canons. 
 
 T"I7HEN you rise in the Morning, pray. Pray again at the 
 • ' Third Hour, and the Sixth, and the Ninth, and in the 
 Evening, and at the time of Cock-crowing. And at the time of 
 the Light appearing, because the Lord has enlightened us : he 
 has caused the night to pass by, and has brought to us also the 
 light of day. And at the Third Hour, because Pilate gave 
 sentence on the Lord at that hour. And at the Sixth, because 
 they crucified Christ at that hour, and when they pierced his 
 side Blood and Water came out. And again at the Ninth, be- 
 cause when they crucified the Lord, all the earth trembled and 
 
68 The Church- and House-Book. 
 
 was troubled at the audacity of the ungodly Jews ; for nature 
 could not bear seeing its Lord mocked. And in the Evening, 
 you shall give thanks, because he has given you the night for 
 rest from the labours of the day. And at the time of Cock- 
 crowing you shall pray, because it announceth to you in that 
 hour the approach of day, that you may proceed to the works 
 of the light to perform them. 
 
 If it be not possible to go into the Church on account of the 
 Unbelievers, thou, O Bishop, shalt make the Assembly in thy 
 House, that the Servants of God may not assemble together 
 with the Ungodly. For it is not the place that sanctifieth the 
 man, but the man that sanctifieth the place. If the Ungodly 
 take possession of the place, flee from it, because they have 
 polluted it. For as holy men sanctify a place, thus again it is 
 that they who are not holy pollute it. 
 
 If it has been impossible to assemble together either in the 
 House or in the Church, let every one sing by himself; let him 
 read, let him pray ; or the Congregation not being there, two 
 or three together. For he saith : " Where two or three are 
 gathered together in my name, I am with them in their midst.'" 
 
 Let not a Believer pray in the houses of the Catechumens, 
 for it is not just that he who partaketh of the Mystery should 
 touch those who partake not. Neither let him who serve th 
 God pray in the house with an Heretic : " For what felloivship 
 has Light with Darkness, or what part has Christ tvith Satan ? " 
 
 If a believing Man or Woman have dwelt with a Slave, 
 let them separate, or let them be cast out of the Church. (75°.) 
 
 XII. On what Days Christians are to celebrate the Commemo- 
 ration of the Dead, 
 
 T ET them keep the Third Day for those who have gone to 
 -^ sleep, with Psalms and Prayers, on account of him who 
 arose from the Dead after three days. 
 
Book IV. Rules of General Conduct. 69 
 
 And let them celebrate their Seventh Day making remem- 
 brance of the living, and those who have slept. 
 
 And let them again celebrate their Month from the pattern 
 of the Ancients ; for thus did the People mourn for Moses. 
 
 And let them observe the Completion of their Year for a 
 Sign of their Remembrance, giving to the Poor out of the 
 Goods of him who has died, making a remembrance of him. 
 
 And we say these things concerning the Servants of God 
 only. But concerning the Ungodly, if thou givest every thing 
 which is in the world for them to the Poor, thou wilt profit 
 them nothing. For those to whom God has been an Enemy in 
 this world, he will not cease being an Enemy to after they have 
 departed out of this world, for there is no Injustice in him: 
 ** The righteous Lord has loved righteousness." And again, 
 " Behold the man and his loork.'" (Can. 76*.) 
 
 ■#• 
 
 XIII. Hoio Presbyters and Deacons are to behave at the Funeral 
 
 Meals, 
 
 "OUT if they call you in those days; eat with order and the 
 -^ fear of God, as those who are able to intercede for those 
 who have departed out of this world ; for ye are Presbyters and 
 Deacons of Christ. You ought therefore to be sober con- 
 tinually, among yourselves alone, and with others, that you 
 may be able to " warn the unruly ; " for the Scripture saith, 
 ^' The great are wrathful : let them not drink wine, lest when 
 they drink they should forget wisdom, and be ujiahle to judge 
 with equity^ And therefore after God Almighty and his 
 beloved Son Jesus Christ, and the Holy Spirit, are not the 
 Bishops and the Presbyters the chief persons in the Church ? 
 
 But we say these things, not forbidding them that they should 
 not drink at all, for it is not possible that, we can despise what 
 God has made for the Cheerfulness of Men ; but wc command 
 
 r 3 
 
70 The Church- and House-Book. 
 
 that they should not drink to excess. For the Scripture^ saith 
 not, " Drink not wine at all ; " but what doth it say ? it 
 saith : " Drink not wine to excess : " and again, " Thorns spring 
 up in the hands of the Drunkard." And we say not this of the 
 Clergy alone, but of the Lay Christians also, upon whom the 
 name of Christ Jesus our Lord hath been called. For these are 
 the things which have been said concerning them : " Who has 
 tvoe? and who has trouble? and ivho has judgmejits ? and who has 
 evil communications ? and zvho has heatings without cause ? or 
 who has his eyes marked? Do not those who tarry long at the 
 wine, and who seek where are the wine taverns ? " (Copt. Can. 
 book V. can. 76^) 
 
 •# 
 
 XIV. Hoiv Cemeteries and Burials are to he arranged. 
 
 T FiT them not burthen a man to bury men in the Cemeteries, 
 -*-^ for it is the work of all the Poor. But let them give Wages 
 to the Workman who diggeth, and a Gift to the Keepers, and 
 to those in that place who have had the care of it. Let the 
 Bishop support them, that no one may press upon them among 
 those who go to those places. (Book ii. can. 61.) 
 
 •# 
 
 XV. That Christians ought to abstain from eating sacrificial 
 
 Meat. 
 
 "13 UT do ye abstain from things offered to Idols ; for they 
 -L' offer them in honour of Demons, that is, to the dishonour 
 of the One God, that ye may not become partners with Demons. 
 (Greek Const, book vii. ch. 21.) 
 
Book IV. Rules of General Conduct. 71 
 
 XVI. How many Days the Servants are to work. 
 
 T ET the Servants work Five Days, but the Sabbath and the 
 -'-^ Lord's Day let them have leisure for the Church, that they 
 may be taught Piety in the service of God. On the Sabbath 
 the Lord rested fi'om all the work of Creation which he had 
 finished : the Lord's Day is (a day of rest) on account of the 
 Resurrection of the Lord. 
 
 And let them not work in the Week of the great Passover, 
 and that which follows it, which is the Feast : the one in which 
 they crucified the Lord, and the other in which he rose from the 
 Dead. For it is necessary that they should know by the Teach- 
 ing who died and rose again. (Can. 75^) 
 
 F 4 
 
72 The Church- and House-Book. 
 
 APPENDIX. 
 
 On Conjugal Life and on Impurities. 
 
 A HUSBAND, therefore, and a Wife, when they live together in 
 -^A- lawful Marriage, and rise from one another, may pray without 
 observing any rite; and without washing they are clean. But 
 whosoever corrupteth and defileth another man's Wife, or is defiled 
 with an Harlot; when he ariseth up from her, though he should wash 
 himself in the entire ocean and all the rivers, cannot be clean. Do 
 not therefore keep any such Observances about legal and natural 
 Purgations, as thinking you are defiled by them. Neither do you 
 seek after Jewish separations, or perpetual washings, or purifications 
 upon the touch of a dead body. But without such Observances 
 assemble in the Cemeteries, reading the holy Books, and singing for 
 the Martyrs which are fallen asleep, and for all the Saints from the 
 beginning of the world, and for your Brethren that are asleep in the 
 Lord, and oflPer the acceptable Eucharist, the representation of the 
 royal body of Christ, both in your Churches and in the Cemeteries ; 
 and in the Funerals of the Departed accompany them with singing 
 if they were faithful in Christ. (Greek Constitutions, book vi. 
 eh. 29°— 30».) 
 
 ■#M-#' 
 
THE 
 
 3lato4i5ooIi of ti)e ;ante jl5ieene 
 
 THIS BOOK CONTAINETH 
 
 Wfic ^tclma^tUal Canons ot tlD^ ^postlrs* 
 
THE FIRST COLLECTION, 
 
 OK THE 
 CONT/ilNETH 
 
 THE FOLLOWING CANONS OE EEGULATIONS 
 (Can. 1—50.) 
 
 I. Touching Ordinations. 
 
 Can. 
 
 How a Bishop is to be ordained - - - - 1 
 
 How a Presbyter and Deacon are to be ordained - - 2 
 
 II. ToucJmig the Oblation and the Communion. 
 
 How the Oblation for the Sacrifice is to be made - 3, 4 
 
 What of First-fruits cometh to the Clergy - - - 5 
 [That a Clergyman must not cast off his Wife under pretence of 
 
 Piety - - . - - - - 6] 
 
 [That he must not meddle with worldly Cares - - ■ 7] 
 
 That the Passover must not be celebrated with the Jews - 8 
 
 That the Clergyman must communicate after the Oblation - 9 
 
 That the Believers must stay for the Communion - - 10 
 
 That a Believer must not pray with an excommunicated 11, 12 
 
 III. Touching Acts which cause Suspetision or Deprivation of 
 
 Clergy. 
 
 That a suspended Clergyman must not be received elsewhere - 13 
 That a Bishop ought not to leave his Parish - - - 14 
 
 That no Clergyman is to do so without consent of his Bishop 15, 16 
 That a Clergyman cannot be twice married, or have a Concu- 
 bine, or a divorced or an improper Person, or Sister-in-law, or 
 first Cousin - - - - - - 17, IS, 19 
 
Can. 
 
 That he must not be a Surety - - - - - 20 
 That he must not be Eunuch by Self-mutilation [for which even 
 
 a Layman is excluded] - - - 21—23. [24] 
 
 That he is to be deposed, if committing Fornication, Perjury, or 
 
 Stealing - - - - - - 25, 26 
 
 [That only Eeaders and Singers may marry after Ordination - 27] 
 
 Also (he is to be deprived) if striking the Offender - - 28 
 
 Al*so if he performeth his Ministration after being deprived - 29 
 
 Also if he obtaineth his Office by Money - - - 30 
 
 Also if by worldly Power - - - - - 31 
 
 Also the Clergyman who sets up an altar against his Bishop - 32 
 
 A suspended Clergyman is not to be received by another Bishop 33 
 No Clergyman who is a stranger to be received without Letters 
 
 Commendatory - - - - - - 34 
 
 IV. Touching the Rights and Duties of Bishops. 
 
 The Bishops to do nothing without him who is the first among 
 their Nation, but look only after their own Towns and 
 Villages; nor is he to act without them - - - 35 
 
 A Bishop who ordaineth out of his Town and the Villages 
 
 belonging to it is to be deposed - - - - 36 
 
 Also he who doth not take care of his Flock - - - 37 
 
 A Synod of Bishops to be held twice a year - - - 38 
 
 The Bishop is to have the Administration of the Substance of 
 
 the Church, but is not to appropriate anything to himself, 
 
 except for his mere maintenance, nor to his Relations 39—41 
 
 V. Touching other Causes of Suspension or Deprivation of 
 Clergy. 
 
 (a) Dice or Drinking [also for Laity] - - - 42, 43 
 
 Usury - - - - - - -44 
 
 (b) Praying with Heretics, or allowing a Heretic to do a part of 
 
 the Service - - - - - - 45 
 
 (c) Recognition of heretical Baptism - - - - 46 
 
Appendix. 
 
 Ca 
 
 Or rebaptizing one who is well baptized - - - 47 
 
 [A Layman who sendeth away his Wife and marrieth another, 
 
 or marrieth a divorced Woman, to be suspended - - 48] 
 
 Or not baptizing into the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost - 49 
 Or only by one Immersion - - - - - 50 
 
 THE SECOND COLLECTION 
 CONTAINETH THE FOLLOWING REGULATIONS. 
 
 (Can. 51— 85.) 
 
 I. Touching Causes of Suspension or Deprivation of the Clergy. 
 
 Abstaining from Flesh and Wine, as forbidden - - - 51 
 
 Not receiving the Penitent - - - - - 52 
 
 Not partaking of Flesh and Wine on Festival Days - - 53 
 
 Eating in a Tavern - - - - - - 54 
 
 Abusing the Bishop, or Presbyter, or Deacon - - 55, 56 
 
 Mocking at a Deaf, or Blind, or Lame - - - - 57 
 
 A Bishop or Presbyter not taking care of his Clergy or People - 58 
 
 Or not supplying the Necessity of one of the Clergy who is in 
 
 want - - - - - - -59 
 
 Or causing Apocryphal Books to be read in the Church - 60 
 
 Former Conviction of Fornication or of a Crime - - 61 
 
 Denying the Name of Christ or of Clergymen - - - 62 
 
 Eating Flesh with the Blood or Carcass [also Laity] - - 63 
 
 Fasting on the Lord's Day or on the Sabbath - - - 64 
 
 Praying with Jews or Heretics - - - - 65 
 
 Striking or killing one in a Quarrel - - - - 6Q 
 
 Offering Violence to a Virgin not betrothed to him, or sending 
 
 away his Wife - - - - - - 67 
 
 Receiving a second Ordination - - - - - 68 
 
Can. 
 
 Not keeping the Fast of the Forty Days, or on "Wednesdays and 
 Fridays - - - - - - -69 
 
 Keeping Fasts or Festivals with the Jews - - - 70 
 
 Doing Service in a Heathen Temple or in a Synagogue - 71 
 
 Taking away from the Church Honey or Oil - - - 72 
 
 Using Church Plate or Linen for Himself - - - 73 
 
 A Bishop not appearing before his brother Bishops if accused, on 
 the strength of at least two good Witnesses, and thrice sum- 
 moned - - - - - - 74, 75 
 
 II. What Persons cannot be ordained. 
 
 A Bishop's Son or Relation, by himself - - - 76 
 
 Deaf or Blind, but not One-eyed or Lame - - 77, 78 
 
 Possessed with a Demon, until they are cleansed - - 79 
 
 One recently baptized or converted from the Gentiles - - 80 
 
 [A Bishop who it hath been said meddleth with public Admini- 
 stration is to be deprived - - - - -81] 
 Servants (Slaves) not to be ordained without their Master's con- 
 sent, and without receiving their freedom - - - 82 
 [A Bishop or Presbyter going into the Army - - - 83 
 Any one abusing the King or the Governor - - - 84] 
 [The Canonical Books of the Old and New Testament, including 
 the Apostolical Constitutions - . _ > 85] 
 
 ■#'^'#- 
 
Cfte €(c\t^\n^ticnl Canons ot tfie 
 
 ET a Bishop be ordained by two or Three Bishops. 
 
 2. A Presbyter by One Bishop, as also a Deacon 
 and the rest of the Clergy. 
 
 3. If any Bishop or Presbyter, otherwise than 
 our Lord has ordained concerning the Sacrifice, 
 
 offer other things at the Altar of God, as Honey, Milk, 
 or strong Drink instead of Wine, any Confects, or Birds 
 or Beasts, or Pulse, otherwise than is ordained, let him be 
 removed. 
 
 4. At their Season it is not lawful to offer at the Altar any 
 thing besides new Ears and fresh Grapes, and Oil for the Holy 
 Lamp, and Incense, at the Time when the Holy Oblation is 
 celebrated. 
 
 5. But let all other Fruits be sent to the House of the 
 Bishop, as First-fruits for him and for the Presbyters, but not 
 for the Altar. Now it is plain, that the Bishop and Presbyters 
 are to distribute them to the Deacons and to the rest of the 
 Clergy. 
 
 6. Let not a Bishop, a Priest, or a Deacon, cast off his 
 own Wife under pretence of Piety ; but if he do cast her 
 off, let him be suspended. If he persist in it let him be 
 removed. 
 
 7. Let not a Bishop, or Priest, or Deacon, undertake the 
 Cares of this World ; but if he do let him be removed. 
 
 8. If any Bishop, or Presbyter, or Deacon, shall celebrate the 
 
80 Law-Book of the Ante-Nicene Church. 
 
 Holy Day of the Passover before the Vernal Equinox of the 
 Jews, let him be removed. 
 
 9. If any Bishop, or Presbyter, or Deacon, or any one in the 
 List of the Priesthood, when the Oblation is over, doth not 
 communicate, let him give his reason ; and if it be just, let him 
 be forgiven ; but if he doth not do so, let him be suspended, as 
 becoming the Cause of Offence to the People, and occasioning 
 a Suspicion against him that offered, as of one that did not 
 rightly offer. 
 
 10. All those of the Believers that enter into the Holy Church 
 of God and hear the sacred Scriptures, but do not stay during 
 Prayer and the Holy Communion, must be suspended, as causing 
 Disorder in the Church. 
 
 11. If any one, even in the House, prayeth with a Person 
 excommunicate, let him also be suspended. 
 
 12. If any Clergyman prayeth with one deprived as with a 
 Clergyman, let himself also be deprived. 
 
 13. If any Clergyman or Layman, who is suspended, or ought 
 not to be received, goeth away, and is received in another City 
 without Commendatory Letters, let both those who received 
 him and him that was received be suspended. But if he be 
 already suspended, let his Suspension be lengthened, as lying to 
 and deceiving the Church of God. 
 
 14. A Bishop ought not to leave his own Parish and go to 
 another, although the Multitude should force him, unless some 
 rational cause compelleth him, being able, perhaps, to confer 
 more gain to those who live there, and performing something 
 useful in the cause of Religion. But this he shall not try by 
 himself; but after the Judgment of many Bishops, and after 
 pressing Supplication. 
 
 15. If any Presbyter or Deacon, or any one of the List of 
 the Clergy, leaveth his own Parish and goeth to another, and 
 entirely removing himself continueth in that other Parish, 
 without the Consent of his own Bishop, him we command no 
 longer to go on in his Ministry, especially in case his Bishop 
 calleth upon him to return, and he doth not obey, but con- 
 
The Ecclesiastical Canons of the Apostles. 81 
 
 tinueth in his Disorder. However, let him communicate there 
 as a Layman. 
 
 16. But if the Bishop, with whom they are, despiseth the 
 Deprivation decreed against them, and receiveth them as 
 Clergymen, let him be suspended, as a Teacher of Disorder. 
 
 17. He who has been twice married after his Baptism, or has 
 had a Concubine, cannot be made a Bishop or Presbyter or 
 Deacon, or, indeed, any one of the Sacerdotal List. 
 
 18. He who has married a divorced Woman, or an Harlot, 
 or a Slave, or one belonging to the Theatre, cannot be a Bishop 
 or a Priest, or a Deacon, or, indeed, any one of the Sacerdotal 
 List. 
 
 19. He who has married two Sisters, or his Brother's 
 Daughter, cannot be a Clergyman. 
 
 20. Let a Clergyman, who becometh a Surety, be deprived. 
 
 21. An Eunuch, if he be such by the Injury of Men, or his 
 Testicles were taken away in the Persecution, or he was born 
 such and yet is worthy of the Episcopate, let him be made a 
 Bishop. 
 
 22. He who has disabled himself, let him not be made a 
 Clergyman ; for he is a Self-murderer and an Enemy to the 
 Creation of God. 
 
 23. If any one who is of the Clergy disable himself, let him 
 be deprived, for he is a Murderer of himself. 
 
 24. A Layman who disable th himself, let him be separated 
 for Three Years, for he layeth a Snare for his own Life. 
 
 25. A Bishop, or Presbyter, or Deacon, who is taken in 
 Fornication, or Perjury, or Stealing, let him be deprived ; but 
 not suspended, for the Scripture sayeth, '' Thou shall not avenge 
 twice for the same Crime by Affliction." 
 
 26. In like manner also as to the rest of the Clergy. 
 
 27. Of those who come into the Clergy unmarried, we 
 permit only the Readers and Singers, if they have a mind, to 
 marry afterwards. 
 
 28. We command that a Bishop, or Presbyter, or Deacon, 
 who striketh the Believers that offend, or the Unbelievers who 
 
 VOL. II. a 
 
82 Law-Book of the Ante-Nicene Church. 
 
 do wickedly, and thinketh to terrify them by such Means, be 
 deprived ; for our Lord hath nowhere taught us such Things. 
 On the contrary, When himself was stricken he did not strike 
 again, when he was reviled he reviled not again, when he suffered 
 he threatened not. 
 
 29. If any Bishop, or Presbyter, or Deacon, who is deprived 
 justly for manifest Crimes, doth venture to meddle with that 
 Ministration which was once intrusted to him, let the same 
 Person be entirely cut off from the Church. 
 
 30. If any Bishop obtaineth that Dignity by Money, or even 
 a Presbyter or Deacon, let him and he that ordained him be 
 deprived, and let him be entirely cut off from Communion, as 
 Simon Magus was by Peter. 
 
 31. If any Bishop maketh use of the Rulers of this World, 
 and by their Means obtaineth to be a Bishop of a Church, let 
 him be deprived and suspended, and all that communicate with 
 him. 
 
 32. If any Presbyter despiseth his own Bishop, and assembleth 
 separately and fixeth another Altar, when he has nothing to 
 condemn in his Bishop, either as to Piety or Righteousness, 
 let him be deprived as an ambitious Person, for he is a Tyrant ; 
 and the rest of the Clergy, whoever join themselves to him. 
 And let the Laity be suspended. But let these things be done 
 after one, and a second, or even a third Admonition from the 
 Bishop. 
 
 ^^. If any Presbyter or Deacon be put under Suspension by 
 his Bishop, it is not lawful for any other to receive him, but 
 him only who put him under Suspension ; unless it happeneth 
 that he who put him under Suspension die. 
 
 34. Do not ye receive any Stranger, whether Bishop or 
 Presbyter or Deacon, without Letters Commendatory, and when 
 such are offered let them be examined ; and if they be Preachers 
 of Piety let them be received ; but if not, supply their Wants, 
 but do not receive them to Communion ; for many Things are 
 done surreptitiously. 
 
 ^^. The Bishops of every Nation ought to know who is the 
 
The Ecclesiastical Canons of the Apostles. 83 
 
 First among them, and him they ought to esteem as their Head, 
 and not to do any great Thing without his Consent, but every 
 one to manage only the affairs that belong to his own Parish, 
 and the Country places and Villages subject to it. But let 
 him not either do any Thing without the Consent of all ; for it 
 is by this means there will be Unanimity, and God will be 
 glorified by Christ in the Holy Spirit. 
 
 SQ. A Bishop must not venture to ordain out of his own 
 Bounds for Cities or Country places (Villages) that are not 
 subject to him. But if he be convicted of having done so 
 without the Consent of such as governed those Cities or Country 
 places, let him be deprived, both he and those whom he hath 
 ordained. 
 
 37. If any Bishop that is ordained doth not undertake his 
 Office, nor take Care of the People committed to him, let him 
 be suspended, until he do undertake ; and in the hke manner 
 a Presbyter or a Deacon. But if he goeth and is not received, 
 not because of the Want of his own Consent, but because of 
 the ill Temple of the People, let him continue Bishop ; but let 
 the Clergy of that City be suspended, because they have not 
 taught that disobedient People better. 
 
 08. Let a Synod of Bishops be held twice in the Year, and 
 let them ask one another the Doctrines of Piety, and let them 
 determine the ecclesiastical Disputes that happen. Once in 
 the fourth Week of Pentecost, and again on the Twelfth of the 
 Month Hyperberetaeus, that is, according to the Romans, on 
 the fourth before the Ides of October. 
 
 39. Let the Bishop have the Care of the Ecclesiastical 
 Revenues, and administer them as in the Presence of God. 
 But it is not lawful for him to appropriate any part of them 
 to himself, or to give the Things of God to his own Kin- 
 dred ; if they be poor let him support them as Poor ; but let 
 him not under such Pretences alienate the Revenues of the 
 Church. 
 
 40. Let not the Presbyters and Deacons do any Thing 
 without the Consent of the Bishop ; for it is he who is intrusted 
 
84 Laio-Book of the Ante-Nicene Church. 
 
 with the People of the Lord, and will be required to give an 
 account of their Souls. Let the proper Goods of the Bishop, 
 if he has any, and those belonging to the Lord, be openly dis- 
 tinguished, that he may have Power when he dieth to leave his 
 own Goods as he pleaseth, that under pretence of the Eccle- 
 siastical Revenues the Bishop's own may not come short, who 
 sometimes has a Wife and Children, or Kinsfolk, or Servants. 
 For this is just before God and Men, that neither the Church 
 suffer any loss by the not knowing which Revenues are the 
 Bishop's own, nor his Kindred under Pretence of the Church be 
 undone, or his Relations fall into Law Suits, and so his Death 
 be liable to Reproach. 
 
 41. We command that the Bishop have Power over the 
 Goods of the Church ; for if he be intrusted, with the precious 
 Souls of Men, much more ought he to administer the Property, 
 that they all be distributed to those in want, according to his 
 Authority, by the Presbyters and Deacons, and be used for 
 their Support, with the Fear of God, and with all Reverence ; 
 he is also to partake of those Things he wanteth, if he doth 
 want them, for his necessary Occasions and those of the Brethi*en 
 who live with him as Guests, that they may not by any means 
 be in Straits. For the Law of God appointed, that those who 
 waited at the Altar should be maintained by the Altar, since not 
 so much as a Soldier doth at any time bear Arms against the 
 Enemies at his own Charges. 
 
 42. A Bishop, or Presbyter, or Deacon, who indulgeth him- 
 self in Dice or Drinking, either let him leave off those Practices, 
 or let him be deprived. 
 
 43. If a Subdeacon, a Reader, or a Singer, doth the like, 
 either let him leave off or let him be suspended ; and so for one 
 of the Laity. 
 
 44. A Bishop, or Presbyter, or Deacon, who requireth 
 Usury of those he lendeth to, either let him leave off to do so 
 or let him be deprived. 
 
 45. A Bishop, or Presbyter, or Deacon, who only prayeth 
 with Heretics, let him be suspended ; but if he also induceth 
 
The Ecclesiastical Canons of the Apostles. 85 
 
 them to perform any Part of the Office of a Clergyman, let him 
 be deprived. 
 
 46. We command that a Bishop, or Presbyter, or Deacon, 
 who receiveth (as valid) the Baptism or the Sacrifice of Heretics, 
 be deprived : For what Agreevient is there hetweeji Christ and 
 Belial, or lohat Part has a Believer with an Infidel 9 
 
 47. If a Bishop or Presbyter rebaptizeth him who has had 
 true Baptism, or doth not baptize him who is polluted by the 
 Ungodly, let him be deprived as deriding the Cross and the 
 Death of Christ, and not distinguishing between real Priests and 
 counterfeit ones. 
 
 48. If a Layman divorceth his own Wife and taketh another, 
 or one divorced by another, let him be suspended. 
 
 49. If any Bishop or Presbyter doth not baptize according to 
 the Lord's Constitution, into the Father, the Son, and the Holy 
 Ghost, but into three Beings without beginning, or into three 
 Sons, or three Comforters, let him be deprived. 
 
 50. If any Bishop or Presbyter doth not perform Three Im- 
 mersions of the one Admission, but One Immersion which is 
 given into the Death of Christ, let him be deprived ; for the 
 Lord did not say. Baptize into my Death, but, " Go ye and 
 make Disciples of all Nations, baptizing them into the Name of 
 the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost." Do ye 
 therefore, O Bishops, baptize thrice into the one Father and 
 Son and Holy Ghost, according to the Will of Christ and our 
 Constitution by the Spirit. 
 
 51. If any Bishop, or Presbyter, or Deacon, or indeed any one of 
 the Sacerdotal Order, abstaineth from Flesh and Wine, not for his 
 own exercise, but out of Hatred of the things, forgetting that All 
 thinffs were very good, and that God made man, male and female, 
 and blasphemously abuseth the Creation, either let him reform or let 
 
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86 Law-Book of the Ante-Nicene Church. 
 
 bim be deprived, and be cast out of the Church ; and the same for 
 one of the Laity. 
 
 52. If any Bishop or Presbyter doth not receive him that returneth 
 from his Sin, but rejecteth him, let him be deprived, because he 
 grieveth Christ, who sayeth, " There is joy in Heaven over one 
 Sinner that repenteth." 
 
 53. If any Bishop, or Presbyter, or Deacon doth not on Festival 
 Days partake of Flesh or "Wine, let him be deprived, as having a 
 seared Conscience, and becoming a Cause of Scandal to many. 
 
 54. If any one of the Clergy be taken eating in a Tavern, let him 
 be suspended, excepting when he is forced to bait at an Inn upon the 
 Ror.d. 
 
 55. If any one of the Clergy abuseth the Bishop unjustly, let him 
 be deprived ; for sayeth the Scripture : " Thou shalt not speak Evil 
 of the Ruler of thy People." 
 
 56. If any one of the Clergy abuseth a Presbyter or a Deacon, let 
 him be separated. 
 
 57. If any one of the Clergy mocketh at a Deaf or Blind Man, or 
 at one lame of his Feet, let him be suspended ; and the like for the 
 Laity. 
 
 58. A Bishop or Presbyter, who taketh no Care of the Clergy or 
 People, and doth not instruct them in Piety, let him be separated, 
 and if he continue in his Negligence, let him be deprived. 
 
 59. If any Bishop or Presbyter, when any one of the Clergy 
 is in want, doth not supply his Necessity, let him be suspended ; 
 and if he continue in it, let him be deprived as having killed his 
 Brother. 
 
 60. If any one causeth publicly to be read in the Church the spu- 
 I'ious Books of the Ungodly, as if they were holy, to the Destruction 
 of the People and of the Clergy, let him be deprived. 
 
 61. If there be an Accusation against a Christian for Fornication 
 or Adultery, or any other forbidden Action, and he be convicted, let 
 him not be promoted into the Clergy. 
 
 62. If any one of the Clergy, for Fear of Men, as of a Jew, or a 
 Gentile, or an Heretic, shall deny the Name of Christ, let him be 
 suspended ; but if he deny the Name of a Clergyman, let him be 
 deprived ; but when he repenteth, let him be received as one of the 
 Laity. 
 
 63. If any Bishop, or Presbyter, or Deacon, or indeed any one of 
 
The Ecclesiastical Canons of the Apostles. 
 
 the Sacerdotal Order, eateth Flesh with the Blood of its Life, or that 
 which is torn by Beasts, or which died of itself, let him be deprived ; 
 for this the Law itself has forbidden ; but if he be one of the Laity, 
 let him be suspended. 
 
 64. If any one of the Clergy be found to fast on the Lord's Day, 
 or on the Sabbath Day, excepting one only, let him be deprived; but 
 if he be one of the Laity, let him be suspended. 
 
 65. If any one either of the Clergy or Laity entereth into a 
 Synagogue of the Jews or Heretics to pray, let him be deprived or 
 suspended. 
 
 66. If any of the Clergy striketh one in a Quarrel, and killeth him 
 by that one Stroke, let him be deprived on account of his Rashness ; 
 but if he be one of the Laity, let him be suspended. 
 
 67. If any one has offered Violence to a Virgin not betrothed, and 
 keepeth her, let him be suspended ; but it is not lawful for Him to 
 take another to Wife, but he must retain her whom he has chosen, 
 although she be poor. 
 
 68. If any Bishop, or Presbyter, or Deacon receiveth a second Or- 
 dination from any one, let him be deprived and he who ordained him, 
 unless he can show that his former Ordination was from the 
 Heretics ; for those that are either baptized or ordained by such as 
 these can be neither Christians nor Clergymen. 
 
 69. If any Bishop, or Presbyter, or Deacon, or Reader, or Singer 
 doth not fast the Fast of Forty Days, or the Fourth Day of the 
 "Week, and the Day of the Preparation, let him be deprived, except 
 he be hindered by weakness of Body; but if he be one of the Laity, 
 let him be suspended. 
 
 70. If any Bishop, or any other of the Clergy, fasteth with the 
 Jews, or keepeth the Festivals with them, or accepteth of the Pre- 
 sents from their Festivals, as unleavened Bread, or any such thing, 
 let him be deprived ; but if he be one of the Laity, let him be sus- 
 pended. 
 
 71. If any Christian carrieth Oil into a Heathen Temple or into a 
 Synagogue of the Jews, or lighteth up Lamps in their Festivals, let 
 him be suspended. 
 
 72. If any one, either of the Clergy or Laity, taketh away from 
 the Holy Church Honey or Oil, let him be suspended, and let him 
 add the fifth part to that which he took away. 
 
 73. A Vessel of Silver or Gold, or Linen, which is sanctified, let 
 
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88 Law-Book of the Ante-Nicene Church. 
 
 no one appropriate it to his own Use, for it is unjust ; but if any one 
 be caught, let him be punished with Suspension. 
 
 74. If a Bishop be accused of any Crime by credible and Faithful 
 Persons, it is necessary that he be cited by the Bishops ; and if he 
 Cometh and maketh his Apology, and yet is convicted, let his Punish- 
 ment be determined ; but if, when he is cited, he doth not obey, let 
 him be cited a second Time by two Bishops sent to him ; but if even 
 then he despiseth them, and will not come, let the Synod pass what 
 Sentence they please against him ; that he may not appear to gain 
 advantage by avoiding their Judgment. 
 
 75. Do not ye receive an Heretic in a Testimony against a Bishop, 
 nor a Christian if he be single, for the Law sayeth : " In the mouth 
 of two or three Witnesses every Word shall he established." 
 
 76. A Bishop must not gratify his Brother, or his Son, or any 
 other Kinsman, with the Episcopal Dignity, or ordain whom he 
 pleaseth ; for it is not just to make Heirs to Episcopacy, and to 
 gratify human Affections in divine Matters ; for we must not put the 
 Church of God under the Laws of Inheritance. But if any one shall 
 do so, let his Ordination be invalid, and let him be punished with 
 Suspension. 
 
 77. If any one be maimed in an eye, or lame of his Leg, but is 
 worthy of Episcopal Dignity, let him be made a Bishop ; for it is not 
 a Blemish of the Body that can defile him, but the Pollution of the 
 Soul. 
 
 78. But if he be deaf and blind, let him not be made a Bishop, not 
 as being a defiled Person, but that the Ecclesiastical Affairs may not 
 be hindered. 
 
 79. If any one hath a Demon, let him not be made one of the 
 Clergy ; nay, let him not pray with the Believers ; but when he is 
 cleansed, let him be received, and, if he be worthy, let him be or- 
 dained. 
 
 80. It is not right to ordain him Bishop immediately, who is just 
 come in from the Gentiles and baptized or from a wicked Conversa- 
 tion ; for it is unjust that he who hath not yet afforded any Trial of 
 himself should be a Teacher of others, unless it anywhere happeneth 
 by Divine Grace. 
 
 81. "We have said, that a Bishop ought not to let himself into 
 public Administrations, but to attend on all Opportunities upon the 
 necessary Affairs of the Church. Either, therefore, let him agree 
 
The Ecclesiastical Canons of the Apostles. 89 
 
 not to do so, or let him be deprived. For, No one can serve two 
 Masters, according to the Lord's Admonition. 
 
 82. We do not permit Servants to be ordained into the Clergy 
 without their Master's Consent, for this would grieve those that 
 owned them. For such a Practice would occasion the Subversion of 
 Families. But if at any time a Servant appeareth worthy to be 
 ordained into a high Office, such as our Onesimus appeared to be, 
 and if his Master alloweth of it, and giveth him his Freedom, and 
 dismisseth him from his House, let him be ordained. 
 
 83. Let a Bishop, or Presbyter, or Deacon, who goeth to the Army, 
 and desireth to retain both the Roman Government and the Sacer- 
 dotal Administration, be deprived, for : The Things of Ccesar belong 
 to CcBsar, and the Things of God to God. 
 
 84. Whosoever shall abuse the King or the Governor unjustly, let 
 hira suffer Punishment ; and if he be a Clergyman, let him be de- 
 prived ; but if he be a Layman, let him be suspended. 
 
 85. Let the following Books be esteemed venerable and holy, by 
 you, both of the Clei-gy and Laity. Of the Old Covenant : the five 
 Books of Moses, Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers and Deutero- 
 nomy, one of Joshua the Son of Nun, one of the Judges, one of Ruth, 
 four of the Kings, two of the Chronicles, two of Ezra, one of Esther, 
 [one of Judith,] three of the Maccabees, one of Job, one hundred and 
 fifty Psalms, three Books of Solomon, Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, and the 
 Song of Songs, sixteen Prophets. And besides these, take care that 
 your young Persons learn the Wisdom of the very learned Sirach. 
 But our sacred Books, that is, those of the new Covenant, are these : 
 the four Gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, the fourteen 
 Epistles of Paul, two Epistles of Peter, three of John, one of James, 
 one of Jude ; two Epistles of Clement, and the Constitutions dedi- 
 cated to you the Bishops, by me Clement, in eight books, which it is 
 not fit to publish before all, because of the Mysteries contained in 
 them, and the Acts of us the Apostles. 
 
 Let these Canonical Rules be established by us for you, ye 
 Bisliops, and if you continue to observe them, ye shall be saved, and 
 shall have Peace ; but if you be disobedient, you shall be punished, 
 and have everlasting War one with another, and undergo a Penalty 
 suitable to your Disobedience. 
 
 Now God, who alone is unbegotten, and the Maker of the whole 
 
90 
 
 Law-Book of the Ante-Nicene Church. 
 
 World, unite you all through his Peace in the Holy Spirit, perfect 
 you unto every good Work, immovable, unblamable, and unreprovable, 
 and vouchsafe to you Eternal Life with us through the Mediation of 
 his beloved Son, Jesus Christ, our God .and Saviour ; with whom 
 Glory be to Thee, the God over all, and the Father, in the Holy 
 Spirit, the Comforter, now and always, and for ever and ever. ' Amen. 
 
 The End of the Constitutions of the Holy Apostles 
 
 by Clement, which are the Catholic 
 
 Doctrine. 
 
NOTES 
 
 TO 
 
 THE CHURCH- AND HOUSE-BOOK OF THE 
 ANTE-NICENE CHURCH. 
 
 TO THE FIRST BOOK. 
 
 INTRODUCTORY NOTE ON THE CRITICAX WORKS RESPECTING THE 
 ORDINANCES OF BAPTISM. 
 
 The seventh volume of Augusti's Denkwiirdigkeiten (1825) deserves 
 to be consulted. On the particular itself we have remarkable Mono- 
 graphs by two truly learned and critical divines of the German 
 Roman-Catholic School : 
 
 Dr. Fr. Brenner, Geschichtliche Darstellung der Verrichtung der 
 Taufe, von Christus bis auf unsere Zeiten. 1818. 
 
 Dr. J. B. Hirscher, Ueber das Verhaltniss des Evangeliums zu der 
 theologischen Scholastik der neuesten Zeit im katholischen Deutsch- 
 land. 1823. 
 
 There is besides a very learned exposition by a Lutheran divine : 
 Hojling, Das Sacrament der Taufe. Erl. 1846. 
 
 The works of Brenner and Hirscher deserve particular credit for 
 the frankness and intrepidity of their researches. Drey's book on 
 the Apostolical Constitutions and Canons, frequently quoted in our 
 Second Volume, also claims respect, not only on account of its true 
 learning, but also of the author's evident sincerity. For instance, 
 where he mentions the Ordinance that the baptized is to repeat the 
 Lord's Prayer before the whole Congregation, he observes that this 
 is an acknowledgment of the general priesthood of every Cliristian, 
 
92 NOTES TO CHURCH- AND HOUSE-BOOK. 
 
 the Catechumen acting as priest in that significant ceremony. This 
 is in the spirit of the words of St. Jerome, in his " Dialogue against 
 Lucifer " (ch. 2.) : " Sacerdotium laici, id est baptisraa." 
 
 Note A. 
 
 ON CHUYSOSTOMUS' RECORD OP THE AKCIENT ORDER OF BAPTISM IN 
 THE CHURCH OF ANTIOCH. 
 
 Neander, in his Johannes Chrysostomus, has proved (p. 180., com- 
 pare notes p. 331 — 338.) that Chrysostom wrote these sermons 
 when he was Presbyter of the Church of Antioch. His record is 
 therefore a document of the formularies of that Church ; and 
 whoever reads it vpill feel that he speaks of them as a traditional 
 text, not the produce of his generation. 
 
 The corresponding prayer in the eighth book of the Greek Con- 
 stitutions (Augusti, Denkw. vii. p. 138 — 141.) is evidently nothing 
 but an enlarged and detailed remodelling of that ancient formulary. 
 It is there followed by a formulary for the prayer which the Bishop 
 pronounces when about to give the blessing to the Catechumens. 
 
 Note B. 
 
 ON THE creed OP THE APOSTLES. 
 
 Introduction. 
 
 "What is called the Creed of the Apostles, or the Apostolic Creed, 
 is a formula grown out of the baptismal instruction given by Christ 
 to the Apostles, according to the conclusion of our Gospel of St. 
 Matthew (xxviii. 19.) : 
 
 "Go ye and make all nations disciples, baptizing (immersing) 
 
 them in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the 
 
 Holy Ghost." 
 
 We find this evangelical form of the confession of the Father, and 
 
 the Son, and the Spirit, almost in its primitive simplicity, recorded 
 
 by the baptismal order of the Church of Alexandria, as will be 
 
 proved more fully when we come to the criticism of the text itself. 
 
B. CREED OF THE APOSTLES. 93 
 
 In the Church of Rome we find an amplification, which is a nearer 
 approach to our present Creed. The Greek text of the Apostolic 
 Constitutions gives us an overcharged amplification of the same 
 form. But to whatever extent it may have been amplified, this 
 pledge of faith never was intended, in the ante-Nicene Church, to 
 express the philosophical consciousness of the Chui'ch as discussed in 
 the Schools. The Creed of the Apostles gradually became an 
 epitome of the leading facts related in the Gospel as to the Father, 
 Son, and Spirit. The second article for instance exhibits in short 
 phrases what is related in the Gospels as to the life of Jesus ; and 
 the Coptic ritual shows that this amplification first existed as a 
 separate supplement, to be recited after the general pledge. The 
 consciousness of the connection between the belief in the Church and 
 her destiny, and the confession of the Spirit, gradually formed the 
 third article. 
 
 The epitome has no value but its faithfulness, and no authority 
 but that of its origin. 
 
 Still the point round which these epitomized elements have 
 crystallized is that which constitutes the whole doctrinal conscious- 
 ness of the ancient Church : the belief in the Father, the Son, and 
 the Spirit. 
 
 This, in the mind of the Primitive Church, was the only real 
 doctrinal point respecting which the historical records of Christianity 
 are in the highest sense authoritative. The rest was considered by 
 that Church as disciplinary, subject to the development of the Spirit 
 in the congregation : so in Baptism itself, so in Communion, so in all 
 which belongs to ethical philosophy, and to the combination of 
 Christian ideas with history and science. 
 
 The most remarkable and important character of the Apostles' 
 Cre^ is consequently this, that it purports to be nothing but an 
 epitome of the New Testament based upon the belief in that divine 
 threefoldness. This is what characterizes Christianity in the history 
 of the religions of the world. Philosophical formularies may take 
 that form of a confession of belief, of a Creed : but they stand upon 
 their own ground, and belong to the Schools, not to the general 
 consciousness of the Chui'ch ; nothing is farther fi*om the spirit and 
 intentions of the ancient Church, than to make such school-for- 
 mularies pledges of communion with Christ. 
 
 The false, uncritical, unhistorical, and in great part dishonest, 
 patchwork of the seventeenth century, has brought forward many 
 formularies as ante-Nicene Creeds, which either are not ante-Nicene 
 
94 NOTES TO CHURCH- AND HOUSE-BOOK. 
 
 at all, or philosophical and doctrinal formulas, not historical and 
 baptismal (catechetic) epitomes. It is our duty to eliminate both. 
 We must not, with Bull, Pearson, and Bingham, admit among 
 ante-Nicene Church Creeds, and as the Creed of the Alexandrian 
 Church, that formulary which Arius and his friend presented to 
 Constantine, and which Socrates has preserved. It is evidently the 
 doctrinal formulary of that learned party. Nor can we admit the 
 formulary of Gregory the Thaumaturg, which we know only through 
 post-Nicene writers, and which is a doctrinal fiction, a metaphysical 
 formulary received by him (says Gregory of Nyssa) in a vision, and 
 not an ecclesiastical confession at all. Nor must we quote that of 
 Lucian the Confessor, which, if genuine, is, again, nothing but the 
 speculation of one of the theological schools, and is moreover only 
 known through Hilarius, and bears on the face of it the stamp of 
 interpolation. Nor can we admit, on the authority of Cassianus, and 
 against all internal evidence, a similar formulary to be the Creed of 
 the Church of Antioch ; we do not know, even, that it represents the 
 theological formula of some of its divines. Least of all can an honest 
 criticism admit as Creeds of the ancient Church those formularies 
 which are found in the so-called Liturgies of St. James, and St. 
 Peter, and St. Mark ; all forgeries, and (like the Liturgy) foisted into 
 the eighth book of the Constitutions, posterior to the Council of 
 Ephesus. It would be superfluous to say a word on this subject 
 after the researches of Neander, Rothe, Hagenbach, and many other 
 German critics. 
 
 But if these fictions or speculations must be banished from the 
 sanctuary of the Church of the second and third centuries, we are 
 enabled, on the other hand, to give some real Church Creeds of the 
 ante-Nicene age, which have since come to light, and they will assist 
 us perhaps in forming a better conception of the stages through 
 which our Creeds have passed. 
 
 All the historical Creeds, called Apostolic, necessarily had a 
 tendency to become gradually more extended, together with the 
 consciousness of the Church respecting her faith, in consequence of 
 certain heretical additions to the doctrine respecting Father, Son, 
 and Spirit. 
 
 These additions are interpolations as to the form, and must rather 
 be considered as such than as falsifications. Some, as it appears, 
 were originally intended merely as illustrations by juxta-position. 
 But in all cases it is interesting to know, or to find out, what the 
 original form of a given Church Creed was. It takes off the 
 
B. CREED OF THE APOSTLES. 95 
 
 doctrinal sharpness of some doubtful points, and reduces all these 
 formularies to their real value, as baptismal epitomes of the evan- 
 gelical accounts, grouped round the confession of Father, Son, and 
 Spii-it, prescribed by the Gospel of St. Matthew for baptism. It 
 also shows which is the right interpretation of the single articles. 
 No one who admits the truth of this can do otherwise than lament 
 the blindness which makes out of such Creeds a new revelation, or 
 imposes their literal expression upon the Christian conscience as a 
 rule of faith, collateral with, or even superior to, the true Apostolic 
 tradition contained in the New Testament. 
 
 All that has been said about the mystery respecting the Creed of 
 the Apostles as a secret formula, and therefore learned by heart, not 
 read out of book, is sheer nonsense. What secret doctrine or mystery 
 could there be veiled in an epitome of the words of Scripture ? The 
 Creed was not given to the Catechumens in writing, that they 
 might learn it by heart, as one of the Fathers says expressly. It 
 was said, not sung : very naturally ; so was the Scripture of which it 
 was an epitome. Still, at a later period, the schoolmen found 
 mysterious reasons even for that : another theological fiction ! 
 
 I. The Creed of the Church of Rome. 
 
 We know the primitive form of this Creed from various undoubted 
 documents which the reader will find discussed in Usserius De 
 Symbolis : particularly from an Anglo-Saxon Psalterium of the year 
 703. St. Augustin explains this text in his treatise De Fide et 
 Symbolo ; we read the same text in Greek in Epiphanius (Hser. 72.), 
 as inserted by one of the opponents of Arius, Marcellus, bishop of 
 Ancyra, into his formulary. 
 
 The two articles, 
 
 " he descended into hell," 
 and 
 
 " The Communion of Saints," 
 indeed, are not found in any genuine form of Confession of this age. 
 The first was inserted as an explanation of the preceding " he was 
 buried," the other in explanation of the "holy Church," as being the 
 congregation of Believers, united amongst each other by Christ. 
 
 The following text exhibits the difference between the primitive 
 
96 NOTES TO CHURCH- AND HOUSE-BOOK. 
 
 form as given in our Text-Book, which most probably was fixed in 
 the earlier part or the middle of the second century, and originally 
 written in Greek, and the later formulary of the Latin Church as the 
 Reformed Churches received it. The additions are put between 
 brackets. 
 
 I believe in God the Father Almighty : 
 
 \_3Iaker of Heaven and Earth ;] 
 And in Jesus Christ his only Son our Lord : 
 Who was [conceived] by the Holy Ghost, born of the Virgin 
 
 Mary, 
 Suffered under Pontius Pilate, 
 Was crucified {_dead'\ and buried, 
 
 [_He descended into Hell,'] 
 The third day he rose again from the dead, 
 He ascended into Heaven, and sitteth at the right hand of [ God] 
 
 the Father [Almighty], 
 From thence he shall come to judge the quick and the dead. 
 
 I believe in the Holy Ghost : 
 The Holy [Catholic] Church: 
 
 [The Communion of Saints :] 
 The forgiveness of sins : 
 The resurrection of the body : 
 
 [And the life everlasting.] 
 Amen. 
 
 H. The Creed of the Church of Alexandria. 
 
 This is only known to us from the Coptic Constitutions of the 
 Apostles, edited in 1848. Its form there is the following : 
 
 I believe in the only true God, the Father Almighty : 
 
 And in his only-begotten Son, Jesus Christ our Lord and Saviour: 
 
 And in the Holy Spirit, the Giver of life : 
 
 the Trinity of the same Substance : 
 
 One Sovereignty, One Kingdom, One Faith, One Baptism : 
 
 in the holy Catholic Apostolic Church : 
 
 in the life everlasting. 
 Amen. 
 It is evident at once that the " Tpme ojioovmog " is an interpolation. 
 So is also the following line, which is a confused and abstract 
 
B. III. THE apostles' CREED. 97 
 
 imitation of the grand words of St. Paul (Eph. iv. 5.) : " One Lord, 
 one faith, one baptism, one God and Father of all, who is above all, 
 and through all, and in all." The natural construction of the whole 
 article reappears only in the next lines : 
 
 in the holy Catholic Apostolic Church, 
 in the life everlasting. 
 
 These two were therefore the first additions, and the two intermediate 
 lines later insertions. Still the first of those two concluding lines is 
 in its present form not primitive, and the second is not found in the 
 genuine forms of the Apostolic Creeds of our age. The necessary 
 consequence, therefore, is, that the whole of the latter part is not pri- 
 mitive. 
 
 The subjoined texts show the gradual progress of extension, as the 
 present text exhibits the final interpolation. 
 
 1. The Primitive Form. 
 
 I believe in the only true God, the Father Almighty : 
 
 And in his only-begotten Son Jesus Christ, our Lord and Saviour : 
 
 And in the Holy Spirit, the Giver of Life. 
 
 2. The First Addition. 
 
 I believe in the only true God, the Father Almighty : 
 
 And in his only-begotten Son Jesus Christ, our Lord and Saviour : 
 
 And in the Holy Spirit, the Giver of life. 
 
 In the Holy Church, 
 
 In the Life everlasting. 
 
 3. The Second Addition, placed between the original Text and the Appendix. 
 
 I believe in the only true God, the Father Almighty : 
 
 And in his only-begotten Son Jesus Christ, our Lord and Saviour : 
 
 And in the Holy Spirit, the Giver of life. 
 
 One Sovereignty, One Kingdom, One Faith, One Baptism. 
 
 in the Holy Church, 
 
 in the life everlasting. 
 
 in. The Apostles^ Creed according to the Seventh Book of the 
 Apostolic Constitutions. 
 
 The authority of the Coptic Baptismal Canons, as being the most 
 authentic text of the most ancient chapter of the Apostolic Ordi- 
 voL. II. n 
 
98 NOTES TO CIlURCn- AND HOUSE-BOOK. 
 
 nances, would suflfice to show that this formulary is not a liistorical, 
 but a scholastic one. The examination of the contents leads to the 
 same conclusion. I have therefore given it merely as an Appendix. 
 But, on the other hand, I believe it to be a scholastic formulary of 
 our age. It expresses, on the whole, the learned consciousness of the 
 Church about the middle of the third century, and is as little Arian 
 as it is Athanasian. Compared with the formularies of Hippolytus 
 and Origen, it shows its character as being decidedly more universal, 
 and less scholastic. After the words, " the first-born of the whole 
 creation," only a portion of the manuscripts have the watchword of 
 the school " not created." 
 
 TO THE THIRD BOOK. 
 
 Note C. 
 
 THE ORIGINAL TEXT OF THE PSALMS AND HYMNS OF THE 
 APOSTOLICAL CHURCH. 
 
 Critical I?ifroduction. 
 
 It has been already observed in the First Volume (Letter V. to Ai-chd. 
 Hare) that all Christian Church poetry has emanated, as to the form, 
 from one of two great sources of Christian thought : the Hebrew or 
 Semitic, and the Hellenic and Roman or Japhetic, elements. The 
 Christians first composed and sang imitations of the Hebrew Psalms, 
 which were either simple centos, strings of Psalm verses, or entirely 
 new compositions conceived in the antiphonic spirit of Hebrew 
 poetry, and therefore without any metre, and meant to be intoned or 
 sung alternately. As to this sort of composition, the Psalmodic verse 
 of the Angels and the three Psalms or Canticles of the New Testa- 
 ment, as preserved in St. Luke's Gospel, had led the way. We 
 give them in the Analecta in this form. Besides them we pos- 
 sess four compositions of this kind: real gems, genuine relics of 
 ancient, congregational, and domestic hymnology. The first three of 
 them have been transmitted to us by the Alexandrian MS. of the 
 
C. EARLY rSALMS AND HYMNS. 99 
 
 Bible, as an Appendix to the Psalms of the Old Testament. Tliey 
 form part of the Bible, preceded by the last Psalm of the Old Testa- 
 ment, and followed by the first chapter of Job. 
 
 The first (see 9» i. p. 141.) is preceded by the rubric: "Yfxi'ng 
 tuOiroc, Morning Hymn, and is written in lyric lines. But there is 
 no trace in it of any metre; and indeed it would be quite inexplicable, 
 if we found in it any but the primitive Hebi^ew element. For this 
 IMorning Hymn of the Primitive Church is evidently alluded to by 
 Pliny, and we find it early used and held in high veneration by the 
 whole Church. It must therefore in its substance be as old as the 
 Johannean writings, if not older. But it is indeed easily reducible to 
 the anti phonic system of Hebrew poetry. 
 
 The Greek Church has preserved this relic in its Liturgy as the 
 "YfxvoQ ayyeXiKOQ, the Angelic Hymn, which name is derived from 
 the introductory verse of the Song of the Angels at the birth of 
 Christ. (Luk. ii. 14.) About the year 380, Hilarius, it appears, 
 transferred this Hymn, in his liturgical compositions and collections, 
 from the Greek to the Latin Church, according to a text not entirely 
 concordant with that of the Alexandrian Codex. The Roman Church 
 introduced the Hymn into the first part of the Communion Service, 
 as a Psalm of Thanksgiving (Doxologia magna or major) after the 
 Absolution ; it appears here already as prose, and with some remark- 
 able variations most likely according to the text of Hilarius. The 
 text of the Apostolic Constitutions (vii. 47.) is also printed as prose, 
 and with variations betraying the hand of one who wished to make 
 that psalmodic effusion a sheer prose prayer, with some doctrinal 
 phrases. The juxtaposition of the three texts will best explain the 
 details. 
 
 But that juxtaposition also gives us the clue to the original form of 
 the Hymn. Of the two lines 
 
 Kai ajLOV Trrivixa 
 Kvpie 6 •S'eoe 
 
 the first is wanting, and the second is made to form the beginning 
 of the Christological part of the Hymn. The Constitutions omit 
 equally the words, " And the Holy Spirit ; " but, as to the words 
 " Lord God," they give them as the conclusion of the first part of the 
 Hymn which praises the Father. Now this arrangement, were it 
 not supported by the official Latin text, would prove nothing ; as the 
 original text has evidently been paraphrased, and may have been 
 tampei'ed with in the Constitutions. But who can believe that the 
 Roman Church would have omitted anything she found in the Greek 
 
 H 2 
 
100 NOTES TO CHURCH- AND HOUSE-BOOK. 
 
 text which she adopted for her Latin service ? Finally, the whole 
 construction of the Hymn shows that those lines are a very clumsy 
 interruption of the Patrologic and the Christologic parts. The interca- 
 lation of the words, " and the Holy Spirit," was intended to make this 
 ancient document of Christian piety and devotion express the faith 
 in Father, Son, and Spirit. The Latin text has made the same 
 intercalation, but not here : it is placed at the end. This circum- 
 stance constitutes the one an evidence against the other, and proves 
 that both texts have undergone some change. Now the two invoca- 
 tions of the Spirit being removed, the question arises: What becomes 
 of the words "Lord God?" As the Alexandrian MS. is without 
 interpunction, or division of strophes, it is impossible to decide from 
 it whether, after the invocation of the Spirit had been added, the 
 words Kvpie 6 -&eoe were understood as forming the conclusion of the 
 preceding sentence, or constituting the beginning of the second, the 
 Christological part. The later Church has undoubtedly referred the 
 words to Christ, as heading the invocation of Him. But certainly 
 this in itself points to the post-Nicene period, when such expressions 
 as the ancient Church never dreamt of applying to Christ, were stu- 
 diously applied (or made to apply) to Him. 
 
 Now, if the words Kvpie. b 5eo'c must have belonged to the first 
 part, it is clear that they were, after the interpolation of the Spirit,, 
 understood as referring to Father, Son, and Spirit ; forming a con- 
 cluding comprehensive invocation of the Deity. But it is also clear 
 that such an interpretation became only possible after the interpolation. 
 Before that intercalation, they must have stood before the words, 
 " Thou, the only begotten Son, Jesus Christ," and have referred to 
 the Father. As soon as we restore them to this their original place, 
 we have a solemn conclusion of the address to the Father, and a na- 
 tural beginning of the invocation of the Divine Word, Jesus the 
 Christ. Our restored text speaks for itself. The Hymn consists of 
 a double invocation ; first of the Father, and then of Jesus the Christ. 
 In this way only we can perfectly understand Pliny's words : "they 
 sing, alternately between themselves (in alternate choirs), and praise 
 Christ as if he were a God " (tanquam Deum), not " as their God." 
 
 As to the other variations between the Greek and Latin text, ex- 
 ternal and internal evidence speaks in favour of the first. That in 
 the last words is of some importance : " in the glory of God," instead 
 of " for the glory of God." 
 
 Upon these grounds rests the entire restoration of the primitive 
 text, which we subjoin to that of the MS. 
 
 The second and third Psalmodic Hymns (see 3* ii. iii. p. 141. 143.) 
 
C. EARLY PSALMS AND HYMNS. 101 
 
 are already in the Alexandrian MS. jumbled into one, which has pro- 
 duced a singular misunderstanding on the part of Usher. He has 
 called the whole " The Evening Hymn," evidently as the counterpai t 
 of what precedes in the MS. This guess, indeed, is supported by the 
 concluding words ; but is irreconcilable with the second verse : 
 " Vouchsafe, O Lord, to keep us this day without sin." On the con- 
 trary the first three verses, concluding with " Amen," form another 
 Morning Hymn, originally used perhaps for private devotion. The 
 composition is very simple : the prayer just quoted is placed between 
 two Psalm verses. The " Amen " marks the conclusion. 
 
 The remainder constitutes the Evening Psalm of the ancient 
 Church. This is merely a cento of verses and hemistichs of Psalms, 
 or that sort of composition which has given birth to many of our 
 most ancient and beautiful antiphonies. There is a spiritual and in- 
 tellectual feeling visible in the selection and in the composition. 
 
 Of this Evening Psalm there is no trace in the later liturgies : but 
 the short verse which constitutes what is original in the preceding 
 Morning Psalm, " Vouchsafe, Lord, to keep us this day without 
 sin," has been preserved to us in the Psalm of Thanksgiving of the 
 Western Church, which we call the Te Deum. 
 
 The Apostolical Constitutions (vn. 48.) give the Song of Simeon 
 as an Evening Hymn. In our MSS. it is printed as the second 
 part of a Psalmodic composition which forms the counterpart 
 of the primitive Morning Hymn, or the Greater Doxology, and is an 
 imitation of the same. This composition proves that the words, 
 " We praise thee," &c., were considei'ed as a separate piece. The 
 preceding words of the Angelic song were placed at the head of the 
 later composition, as a sacred text. This ai'rangement is common 
 both to the Morning and the Evening Psalm of the early Christians. 
 One may conjecture that this imitation refers to a still simpler form 
 of that beautiful Morning Thanksgiving, but of this there is no docu- 
 mentary proof. (See €* p. 144) 
 
 These are all the authentic and genuine remains we possess of the 
 ante-Nicene psalmody and hymnology of Christendom, as far as it 
 adopted the Hebrew form. Such then are the Psalmodic compositions 
 of the ancient Church in the stricter sense. 
 
 But we Kave at least one composition of Hellenic source : the Ave- 
 Maria Hymn, as we might call it, from the present Italian custom of 
 marking by prayer the complete setting of the sun, or more accurately 
 the moment when the candles are lighted. (See 33. p. 144.) It is also 
 called the " Hymn of the Kindling of the Lamp " ("Yynroc mv Ai-^itKor). 
 
102 NOTES TO CHURCH- AND HOUSE-BOOK. 
 
 Usher (whose notes on the Alexandrian MS. we subjoin) has not 
 only proved that Basilius the Great (or whoever may be the author 
 of the remarkable and learned treatise on the Holy Spirit) refers to 
 the " Thanksgiving of the Lighting of Candles " as an " ancient pious 
 voice of the people," but he has also happily suggested that the begin- 
 ning may refer to the custom of the ancient Greeks, who, according to 
 Varro, said when the light was brought in, <pu>Q ayaQov, " the good 
 light " or " the light is good ; " as the Italians say, on the same occa- 
 sion, " Felicissima sera." The Christians of the Greek tongue trans- 
 ferred these words, with a slight variation ; suiting the prayer and its 
 object to the Hymn with which they greeted the Evening Star and 
 the Domestic Lamp, elevating thence their thoughts to the eternal 
 light of the soul. Usher is wrong in supposing that the 'ETrtXy^'^ioc 
 -i^aXfioQ and the "Yj-ivoq tov \v^vih:ov are the same ; the first is Davidic, 
 the latter Hellenic ; but they were probably used indiscriminately. 
 
PART n. 
 
 INTEEPEETATION AND APPLICATION. 
 
 U 4 
 
TUE 
 
 INTERPKETATION AND APPLICATION. 
 
 BOOK I. 
 
 THE CHRISTIAN SCHOOL AND BAPTISMAL VOW. 
 
 I. 
 
 THE PICTURE. 
 
 The Apostolical Church made the School the connecting link 
 between herself and the world. The object of this education 
 was admission into the free society and brotherhood of the 
 Christian community. The Church adhered rigidly to the 
 principle, as constituting the true purport of the baptism or- 
 dained by Christ, that no one can be a member of the com- 
 munion of Saints, but by his own free act and deed, his own 
 solemn vow made in presence of the Church. It was with this 
 understanding that the candidate for baptism was immersed in 
 water, and admitted as a brother, upon his confession of the 
 Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost. It understood baptism, 
 therefore, in the exact sense of the First Epistle of St. Peter 
 (iii. 21.), not as being a mere bodily purification, but as a vow 
 made to God with a good conscience, through faith in Jesus 
 Christ. Fustin Martyr calls baptism a dedication of ourselves 
 to God. This vow was preceded by a confession of Christian 
 faith, made in the face of the Church, in which the Catechumen 
 expressed that faith in Christ and in the sufficiency of the sal- 
 vation offered by Him. It was a vow to live for the time to 
 
106 INTERPRETATION AND APPLICATION. 
 
 come to God and for his neighbour, not to the world and for 
 Self; a vow of faith in his becoming a child of God through the 
 communion with his only begotten Son in the Holy Ghost ; a 
 vow of the most solemn kind, for life and for death. The keep- 
 ing of this pledge was the condition of continuance in the 
 Church : its infringement entailed repentance or excommuni- 
 cation. All Church discipline was based upon this voluntary 
 pledge, and the responsibility thereby self-imposed. But how 
 could such a vow be received without examination ? How 
 could such examination be passed without instruction and 
 observation ? 
 
 As a general rule, the ancient Church fixed three years for this 
 preparation, supposing the candidate, whether heathen or Jew, 
 to be competent to receive it. "With Christian children the 
 condition was the same, except that the term of probation was 
 curtailed according to circumstances. Pedobaptism, in the more 
 modern sense, meaning thereby baptism of new-born infants, with 
 the vicarious promises of parents or other sponsors, was utterly 
 unknown to the early Church ; not only down to the end of the 
 second, but indeed to the middle of the third century. We shall 
 show, in a subsequent page, how, towards the close of the 
 second century, this practice originated in the baptism of 
 children of a more advanced age. 
 
 Hence we find in the Christian school of that period, four 
 great acts, three of which were common both to the new con- 
 verts and to Christian children ; previous examination of the 
 Jewish or heathen candidates who presented themselves ; in- 
 struction and examination immediately before immersion and 
 the taking of the vow ; and lastly, that ceremony itself. 
 
 I. Previous Examination. 
 
 Upon this point we possess an entire document in its original 
 shape, which we find again, in a precisely similar form, in the 
 Churches of Alexandria and of Antioch, as the expression of a 
 primitive and universal ecclesiastical custom. Every member of 
 
CHRISTIAN SCHOOL. 107 
 
 the community might present to the Bishop or Presbyters those 
 who offered themselves for instruction in Christianity, and might 
 give such testimony or guarantee as was required before the 
 examination took place. Almost all the social questions of the 
 day came under discussion during these examinations, and emi- 
 nently among them the important one of slavery. The resolution 
 at which the Church arrived on this point bears the impress of 
 high moral faith and courage, as well as of Christian wisdom. 
 The slave, even of a heathen, was not admitted unless he 
 promised to deserve his master's good-will by honest behaviour, 
 and to abandon every practice which was incompatible with his 
 Christian vow and confession of faith in the proffered salva- 
 tion. He was to be taught that it became a Christian to fulfil 
 all righteousness. Moreover, he was to abstain from all sacri- 
 ficial meat, and not to give himself up to any form of that im- 
 morality to which slavery offered a temptation, and which 
 heathenism had almost sanctioned. But even the master of a 
 slave was inadmissible into, or incapable of remaining in, the 
 Communion, unless he gave his slaves, of both sexes, an oppor- 
 tunity of abandoning personal impurity, and of entering into 
 married life. All the moral philosophers and national econo- 
 mists of the day (and the Romans were in this practically and 
 theoretically eminent) must have held this to be a most serious, 
 if not unjustifiable, attack on the rights of property, ever 
 the most sacred in the eyes of the Romans, the divine right of 
 the Sovereign Man. 
 
 Idolatrous superstitions and impure trades were disqualifica- 
 tions, if not abandoned at once. This again was a general attack 
 upon the deep'seated irregularities of the heathen world. It 
 may be enough to mention here omens and all the superstitions 
 connected with the evil eye, and protection against charms {gU- 
 tatura, fascinus), which are still as prevalent, in all the South of 
 Europe, as they were during the middle ages, and which are 
 studiously encouraged even in all the Romanic countries; in 
 most of them, indeed, are made use of as an engine of the state 
 police. 
 
 A person possessed, /'. e. subject to paroxysms of frenz}^ 
 lunacy, or epilepsy, could only be admitted in very pressing 
 
108 INTERPRETATION AND APPLICATION. 
 
 exceptional cases. As to military men, the ancient Church was 
 as far from rejecting them as John the Baptist was, whose words 
 are quoted in our Text-Book. That document concludes with 
 a beautiful addition of the compilers, as though speaking in the 
 name of the Apostles : " But, if we have omitted anything, 
 experience will teach you, for we all have the Spirit of God." 
 
 II. Christian Instruction. 
 
 Catechetical instruction, as a general rule, was limited to three 
 years ; so that the Catechumen, after having completed the first 
 year satisfactorily, might be admitted to hear the Word of God 
 and the sermon ; at the conclusion of which, after solemn prayer 
 and the blessing, he was dismissed before the worship of the 
 believers, the service of the general congregation, commenced. 
 Nothing can be more natural ; for the celebration of the Lord's 
 Supper was the solemn act of the believers, and implied re- 
 ception into the Christian community, of which it was intended 
 to be the sacred symbol. I can no more understand, therefore, 
 the objections raised by some Protestant scholars against this 
 division of the service, than I can the mischievous notion, 
 adopted by some Catholic or Catholicizing divines even at the 
 present day, of a secret doctrine, an invention of their own, from 
 which the Catechumens were to be excluded. The institution, 
 on the contrary, arose out of the nature of the case, and was 
 therefore suitable to the occasion. No one can take part in the 
 solemn ceremony of a close society, except one who has been 
 received into it. To have allowed it would have been a con- 
 tradiction in terms. 
 
 The system of instruction was based upon the Law as much 
 as upon Faith. It commenced with the Decalogue, as being 
 the written moral law ; but the Ten Commandments were not 
 enjoined as an external law to be literally observed, with which 
 the observance of the Sunday, which threw into the background 
 tliat of the Sabbath, was incompatible. The obligation imposed 
 was shown to be an internal one, in the spirit of Christ's com- 
 
CTIUISTIAN SCHOOL. 109 
 
 mandments, the love of God and of our neighbour. The Sermon 
 on the Mount furnished a deeper insight into the moral law, 
 and resolved all unlawfulness into offences against it, by sub- 
 stituting internal holiness for justification by works. Thus the 
 believing heathen became reconciled with the Jewish system, as 
 the Jew did with what must at first have repulsed hira, as being 
 a violation of the Law. Next came the initiation into the 
 history of Revelation, from Adam, the father of mankind, the 
 image of God, and Abraham, in whom all nations were blessed, 
 down to Christ, whose life and death formed the centre of this 
 hallowed history of the human race. The books of the Old 
 Testament, and the canon of the New, which were gradually 
 being closed, were placed before the Catechumen, together with 
 useful Christian compositions. For, by degrees, a Christian 
 literature was formed, the first specimens of which were re- 
 garded in the same light as the apocryphal books were by the 
 later Jews. At that time, almost every inhabitant of the towns 
 .throughout the Roman empire, which were the cradles of the 
 Christian Churches, knew how to read. 
 
 In the earliest Church, the office of teacher was open to all. 
 Every one taught to whom the Spirit gave the vocation. By 
 degrees the office of the Elders became an office of teachers, 
 and that of the Deacons also. Our Text-book presents to us 
 already distinct ecclesiastical offices ; but still, according to them, 
 laymen who were duly qualified, might also instruct the Cate- 
 chumens ; for the book states that the Scripture says, " They 
 shall all be taught of God." 
 
 The Alexandrian text, in mentioning the Prayer for the 
 Catechumens, and the imposition of hands which ensued, adds : 
 •' So let it be, therefore, whether he be an Ecclesiastic or 
 Layman who offers the prayer." 
 
 IIL The Examination. 
 
 \\\ the third and last year of the preparation, the Catechumens 
 were called competentes, or candidates, as in the second they had 
 
no INTERPRETATION AND ArPLICATION. 
 
 been called hearers. Before they were set apart from the rest, 
 in immediate preparation for baptism, an examination was made 
 as to their life and condnct during the period of probation, the 
 principal stress being laid upon whether they had honoured the 
 widows, visited tlie sick, and performed other works of Christian 
 cliarity. Those who had first introduced them to the community, 
 were obliged to witness to these facts in the character of sponsors. 
 It is unnecessary to say, that this examination was a pubKc one. 
 The congregation was, and continued to be, tlie supreme judge. 
 Those who inhabited estates or villages which formed small 
 congregations by themselves, under a single clergyman, may 
 have gone through the preliminai'y steps at their homes ; but 
 the completion must have been left to the judgment of the 
 mother Church after a sufficient examination. 
 
 IV. The Baptismal Voiv, and the immediate Preparation for it. 
 
 If the candidates passed this ordeal, they were first bathed, 
 and pronounced personally clean ; they fasted on the Friday, 
 and met together solemnly on the Saturday. Thereupon they 
 were commanded to pray. They knelt down, and received the 
 Bishop's blessing, who exorcised every unclean spirit, bidding 
 him go out from them, and from that time forth never again to 
 enter into the soul, which was to be dedicated to the Lord. 
 
 After the conclusion of this solemn ceremony of exorciseraent 
 from all evil and impurity, and liberation from the ancient curse 
 and enmity with God, the Bishop breathed upon each of them, 
 as the Lord had done upon His disciples, and then sealed them 
 (as the Text-Book expresses it) on the foreheads, ears, and 
 lips, doubtless with the sign of the cross. The whole night 
 was passed in prayer and exhortation ; each neophyte being 
 allowed only to eat of the bread which he had brought with 
 him as the thank-offering for the following Sunday, his con- 
 tribution towards the general meal. At the dawn of Sunday, 
 the baptismal font was filled, accompanied by a blessing, which 
 
BArTTF;i\rAL vow. Ill 
 
 corresponds exactly with the prayers used in consecrating the 
 elements intended for the Lord's Supper. The Deacons assisted 
 the men, and the Deaconesses the women, to take off all their 
 ornaments, and put on the baptismal dress. They were then 
 presented to one of the Presbyters, who called solemnly on each 
 of them to renounce Satan, and all his service, and all his works. 
 In the Church of Jerusalem, doubtless in conformity with an 
 ancient custom, the Catecliumen turned himself towards the 
 West, as the symbol of spiritual darkness, out of which he was 
 to be brought into eternal light. 
 
 After this solemn renunciation he was anointed by the Pres- 
 byter with the oil of exorcism, an expression of the Alexandrian 
 Church, the meaning of which is explained by the words used 
 by the Elder upon this occasion : " Let every evil spirit depart 
 from thee." It is expressly stated in other ordinances that he 
 was anointed from head to foot, a completion, as it were, of the 
 preparatory bath by which the body was purified ; and this is 
 indisputably the original signification. The Deacon and Dea- 
 coness accompanied the neophytes into the water, and made 
 each of them in turn repeat after them a confession of faith in 
 the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost, or respond to it by the words 
 ** I believe." This Creed was mucli more simple in the Churches 
 of the second and third centuries, than the formula which we 
 use under the name of the Apostles' Creed, and evidently ori- 
 ginated in the baptismal formula of St. Matthew's Gospel. In 
 the Western Church the most simple Creed was that of Rome, 
 the authentic form of which, in the fifth, sixth, and seventh 
 centui'ies, is still extant. That of Alexandria, however, kept 
 still closer to the Gospel form. The shape in which it appears 
 in the present text of the Coptic Church-Book bears evident 
 marks of a post-Nicene interpolation, as well as of some equally 
 clumsy additions made at any earlier period. By tracing these 
 additions, we easily perceive that the only portion of the Christian 
 Creed which can be proved to have been universally recognised 
 as such had a strictly objective sense, and was couched in terms 
 agreeable to the language of Scripture. Not that the other 
 parts of it were not true also ; but they were not considered 
 binding on the consciences of the whole Christian body, and 
 
112 INTERPRETATION AND APPLICATION. 
 
 thus the unhallowed bondage of scholastic forms was avoided. 
 The ambiguous and unscriptural expression, " Communion of 
 Saints" (i. e. believers), for instance, is not found in any one of 
 these confessions. This is shown more in detail in the first note 
 to the preceding Part. 
 
 The necessity for establishing orthodox formulas as to the 
 person of Jesus, in opposition to the false doctrines of the 
 Gnostics and Ebionites, led in the Alexandi'ian ritual to a 
 supplemental Creed, which corresponds with our present second 
 article in the Apostles' Creed, inasmuch as they both contain a 
 condensed summary of the Gospel narrative, with the addition 
 of a few words about the Holy Ghost, the groundwork of our 
 present third article. This supplemental formula is a direct 
 external testimony that the proper baptismal confession itself 
 did not contain these amplifications. 
 
 That Confession was three times repeated, being uttered 
 before each of the three immersions, and generally addressed to 
 the neophyte in the shape of a question, to be answered in the 
 affirmative with the words " I believe." After that followed 
 the true baptismal unction with the precious oil, the so-called 
 Chrisma. According to the Alexandrian Constitution, the hand 
 with the oil was laid on the head of the baptized, and then the 
 forehead anointed with the sign of the cross, which in the strict 
 sense is called the Sealing. The ordinances of this Church 
 mention the Presbyters as executing all these functions as well 
 as the Bishop, with the exception of the blessing of the oil. 
 The ceremony concluded with the Christian kiss. 
 
 V. TJie Admission. 
 
 After this the persons baptized were clothed in white and 
 conducted into the Church. 
 
 Unction represented, in the minds of the Church, the 
 universal priesthood of Christians. In order to substantiate 
 this, the person anointed had first of all to reply to the salu- 
 
BAPTISMAL VOW. 113 
 
 tation of the Bishop or Elder, " The Lord be with thee," in the 
 words " And with thy spirit." The same ordinances enjoin 
 that every neophyte should pray, and utter with his own lips the 
 salutation of peace, in the precise words in which the Bishop 
 addresses the congregation before the Lord's Supper, " Peace 
 be with you." The Greek Constitutions express the exhibition 
 of this universal priesthood not less significantly, by prescribing 
 that the neophytes should turn to the East and repeat the 
 Lord's Prayer aloud, " in the name of the whole congregation." 
 After this they partook of the Lord's Supper, in which milk and 
 honey were set before them, as well as the bread and wine, 
 doubtless as symbols of their being, as it were, newly born. 
 
 Baptism is indeed called new-birth, " regeneration." But in 
 what sense ? Was it a sort of magical conversion of the curse 
 into a blessing, effected now, in the case of the infant, by the 
 act of sprinkling ? Was it a forgiving of sins not intended to 
 be brought back to the recollection of the parents or sponsors 
 who were present, but to be applied to the infant itself? 
 
 The ancient Church knew no more than do the Gospels and 
 the Apostles of such superstition, which contains less spii*ituality 
 than many of the lustrations of the old world, and not much 
 more than the tauroholia and crioholia, mysteries of the last 
 stages of heathenism, purporting to purify the neophyte by the 
 blood of victims. On the contrary, she bears authentic testi- 
 mony, in all her ordinances, against this corruption and mis- 
 understanding. As in other cases, the origin was innocent, and 
 I think that we are at this moment better able than either the 
 defenders or opponents of infant baptism have hitherto been, to 
 explain how it originated. A passage in our Alexandrian 
 Church-Book gives the true explanation of the assertion of 
 Origen, himself an Alexandrian, that the baptism of children 
 was an Apostolical tradition, and it removes the origin of infant 
 baptism from TertuUian and Hippolytus to the end of our 
 present period, Cyprian being the first Father who, impelled hy 
 a fanatical enthusiasm, and assisted by a bad interpretation of 
 the Old Testament, established it as a principle. 
 
 VOL, II. I 
 
114 INTERPRETATION AND APPLICATION. 
 
 Origen, in three passages (Note A. to this Part) of which the 
 sense is in the main the same, says that the Levitical injunction 
 of the sacrificial purification for the first-born infant seems to 
 him a proof that impurity and sinfulness attach to man from his 
 birth, and that for this reason the Church, according to Apo- 
 stolical tradition, performs the act of baptism even upon children. 
 He employs the same expression for children which Jesus used 
 when the disciples endeavoured to prevent them from being 
 brought unto Him: "Suffer the little children (parvuli) to 
 come unto me ; " a word which Ireneeus uses in a remarkable 
 passage (FLsev. ii. 22. ; quoted in our First Part), imply- 
 ing a difference between babes (infantes) and boys (pueri), 
 obviously intending, therefore, to express what those words in 
 the Gospel clearly mean, little growing children from about 
 six to ten years old. Such, then, is also the true interpretation 
 of this and of the other two passages in Origen, where the same 
 word occurs. But a comparison with what appears from our 
 Text-Book to have been considered Apostolical tradition before 
 the time of Origen, shows that no other interpretation is admis- 
 sible. The Text-Book speaks of those who go down with the 
 other Catechumens into the baptismal bath, but are not yet in a 
 state to make the proper responses ; in that case the parents are 
 bound to do it for them. This is undoubtedly the Apostolical 
 practice to which Origen refers, for it was to the Church of 
 Alexandria that he particularly belonged. In this ordinance 
 the whole arrangement seems to be an exceptional one ; and so 
 it is in Origen, for he says the " little ones also." When the 
 Church instituted pedobaptism (in the sense of children from six 
 to ten years of age), she doubtless had before her eyes our Lord's 
 affectionate words, referred to likewise by Origen on the occa- 
 sion ; and the divines of the sixteenth century soon found them- 
 selves obliged to revert to them. Tertullian rejects, in the 
 following terms, such an interpretation of that expression, after 
 having refuted the objections urged by some persons against the 
 postponement of baptism, on the strength of the story of the 
 baptism of the eunuch by Philip, and that of St. Paul (De Bapt. 
 c. 18.): — "For it is desirable to postpone baptism according 
 to the position and disposition of each individual, as well as in 
 
BAPTISMAL VOW. 115 
 
 reference to his age, but especially so in the case of children 
 (parvuli). Where is the necessity for placing the sponsors in 
 jeopardy, who may be prevented by death from performing their 
 promises, or may be deceived by the breaking out of an evil dis- 
 position ? It is true that our Lord said, ' Hinder them not from 
 coming unto me ;' but they may do so when they have arrived 
 at the age of puberty, they may do so when they have begun to 
 learn, and when they have learned to whom they are going. 
 Why should they at that innocent age hasten to have their sins 
 forgiven them ? Ought we to act with less circumspection than 
 in worldly matters, and allow those who are not intrusted with 
 earthly property to be intrusted with heavenly ? . . . 
 Whoever attaches to baptism the importance it deserves, will 
 be afraid rather of being too hasty than too procrastinating. 
 True faith is sure of salvation." This is the way in which 
 Tertullian treats the subject of baptism of the growing children. 
 What would he have said to the application of Christ's words to 
 the case of infants ? 
 
 The difference, then, between the ante-Nicene and the later 
 Church was essentially this : the later Church, with the ex- 
 ception of converts, only baptized new-born infants, and she 
 did so on principle ; the ancient Church, as a general rule, 
 baptized adults, and only after they had gone through the 
 course of instruction, and, as the exception only, Christian 
 children who had not arrived at years of maturity, but never 
 infants. TertuUian's opposition is to the baptism of young, 
 growing children ; he does not say one word about new-born 
 infants. Neither does Origen, when his expressions are ac- 
 curately weighed. Cyprian, and some other African bishops, 
 his contemporaries, at the close of the third century, were the 
 first who viewed baptism in the light of a washing away of the 
 universal sinfulness of human nature, and connected this idea 
 with that ordinance of the Old Testament, circumcision. If 
 the sin to be washed away were not as much that actually com- 
 mitted as original hereditary sin, a new-born child might cer- 
 tainly as well be baptized as one growing up ; or rather, it 
 would be the most natural and the safest thing to do so. 
 Indeed, Cyprian thought the second day safer than the eighth, 
 
 I 2 
 
116 INTERPRETATION AND APPLICATION. 
 
 which some of his brethren proposed, as being analogous to the 
 law respecting circumcision. Go but one step farther ; establish 
 a principle of aggression instead of defence, and baptism will 
 be exclusively the water of regeneration, not for sins con- 
 sciously committed before conversion, but for hereditary dis- 
 position to sin only, leaving penances and priestly absolutions 
 to procure forgiveness for the sins after baptism and secure 
 ** baptismal regeneration." 
 
 There are two very different reasons why the Church has 
 been dragged into this wrong path. The first is the deep 
 feeling prevalent in the Apostolic communities, of the evil of 
 sin, of the sinfulness of man, and of his need of salvation, and 
 the faith in the salvation brought and announced by Christ. 
 This salvation consisting in communion with Christ, conse- 
 quently with the congregation of the believers, any one who 
 happened to be prevented by sickness or death from living in 
 this communion, wished naturally to die in it. The only ex- 
 planations of St. Paul's expression (1 Cor. xv. 29.) which can 
 be maintained on philological and historical grounds, " Why are 
 they then baptized for the dead?" implies the existence of a 
 custom, the practice of which is not disapproved by the Apostle 
 in that passage, but which subsequently is only found among 
 the Cerinthians, Marcionites, and other sects. A brother or a 
 Catechumen who could prove that a deceased Christian friend 
 had a believing disposition, and a desire to be admitted into the 
 Church, received baptism in his stead ; that is to say, he made, 
 in the presence of the congregation, the confession of faith, and 
 took the baptismal vow for him. This evidence being given, 
 such a one was considered as a brother, and as having " departed 
 in peace," and was so mentioned in the prayers of the Church. 
 This is, in truth, nothing else but testimony to a fact, a well- 
 grounded evidence of a departed brother having held the Chris- 
 tian faith during his lifetime. It is a form of the recognition of 
 the " Baptism of Tears or Longing," which, like the " Baptism 
 of Blood," was held equivalent to regular baptism. But cer- 
 tainly that form also betrays something of the superstitious fear 
 of demons (SsiaiSaifiovla) of the Jewish-heathen world, and this 
 very absorbing dread of demoniacal influence must be considered. 
 
[baptismal vow. 117 
 
 as the second cause of the deviation from Apostolical doctrine 
 and practice. That demonism has its deepest root in the moral 
 hopelessness of the age, the despair of mankind as to itself and 
 as to God, and, on the part of Christians, to the existing order 
 of the world. It is unphilosophical and unhistorical, in tracing 
 the development of Church doctrine, to overlook the prevalence 
 of that feeling of decay and death which pervaded those ages. 
 Doctrine as well as practice took a pathological development, 
 because the age was both a despairing and a desperate one. 
 There is no other way of explaining the infatuation of supposing 
 that the sentence of condemnation, which Scripture and con- 
 science proclaim against ungodly selfish nature striving in man 
 for the mastery, could apply to the case of infants, in whose 
 conscience the consciousness of God is as much implanted as is 
 the God-forgetting love of self. It is as though the fear of 
 those demons, which the Church endeavoured to expel, as being 
 the masters of the " old man," had again entered into the 
 African divines. They made out of the extreme exception the 
 unexceptionable rule, and hallowed as a Church doctrine, on 
 which the salvation of the soul depended, what they must have 
 despaired of justifying either by reason or by the ancient Church 
 practices. Thus the Christian conscience became gradually be- 
 wildered. The paternal face of God, who hates iniquity, but 
 loves His own creation and image, was transformed into the cari- 
 cature of a bloodthirsty Moloch, and the way was paved for 
 spiritual despotism. 
 
 It is the tame copy of this caricature which still prevents the 
 eternal love of God being felt as it ought in the Church of the 
 free Gospel, and stifles that consciousness of the evil and misery 
 of real sin, which was the truest element in the religious feeling 
 of the ancient Church. This is the consequence of the ad- 
 mission of an untruth. When the Church attached rights and 
 promises of blessing to any thing except to the conscious 
 abandonment of sin, and to the voluntary vow of dedicating life 
 and soul to the Lord, as Justin the Martyr as well as St. Peter 
 defines it, the consciousness of sin and the longing for real 
 truthful I'eformation died away in the same proportion among 
 her members. 
 
 I 3 
 
118 
 
 II. 
 
 THE CHURCHES OF THE PRESENT DAY REFLECTED IN THIS 
 
 PICTURE. 
 
 "When we look upon the picture thus presented to us of the 
 general consciousness of the ancient Church, as exhibited at the 
 beginning of the third century, we at once remark in it some 
 dark spots which, upon closer observation, do not become 
 transparent. Who can identify himself with the demonism 
 which, like an incubus, presses upon the religious consciousness 
 of that age ? Who with that striving after forms which tends 
 to give to externals the appearance of objective reality, and 
 thus throws into tlie background the true objective, the Divine 
 essence, as well as its only true reflex, the human mind ? Every 
 retrograde step in spiritual religion is based on one of these two 
 errors : heathen demonism, which binds the free spirit under the 
 yoke of necessity, the powers of nature, and thus destroys the 
 subjective element of religion ; and Jewish formalism, which 
 places the objective in externals, and thereby loses sight of God, 
 the real objective, and of the God-seeking spirit. It cannot be 
 denied that the germ of both these unhealthy tendencies, for- 
 malism and demon-fear (the BiiaiSai/jbovia of Greek writers), 
 began to show itself already in the ancient Church. And who 
 does not at once perceive in the background the dark clouds of 
 hierarchism, which endeavours to obtain dominion over con- 
 science, in order to gain the mastery over the mind, and to 
 substitute for the " Prince of this world " the Priest of this 
 world ? But these sombre clouds only serve to make the light 
 of the foreground more vivid, and these dark spots become dis- 
 solved, in the telescope of historical contemplation, into un- 
 developed or veiled light. Substitute for demons, the formula : 
 *' the powers of nature," place conscious selfishness as its ex- 
 ponent in man, and prefix to the whole the minus sign in order 
 
ANCIENT BAPTISM AND MODERN. 119 
 
 to indicate that this selfishness is the negation of real existence. 
 In doing so, you express that same philosophical truth mathe- 
 matically, which those men saw before their mind's eye in the 
 nebulous, but then impressive, forms of the mythological pro- 
 cess. Do not, therefore, despise such mythological expressions ; 
 rather see whether they are not the historically necessary form 
 of an eternal truth, which it is better to express imperfectly 
 than to ignore or deny. If ever you succeed in discovering the 
 Keplerian laws of the progress of mind through time, those 
 nebulae will have the same place in your system, which the 
 mythology of the Greeks occupies in the history of their 
 philosophy, that of a preformation. You will not covet, then, 
 those forms which were not made for you nor for your nation, 
 and which the ancient Church invented with the same freedom 
 with which you may reject them. But you will understand 
 them for the first time, as being a part of universal history. 
 Admit them then without hesitation, without any fear of 
 thereby forfeiting your holy zeal for truth, if in your time, 
 and among your co-religionists, the type should establish itself 
 in place of the idea, and the symbol usurp the throne of God 
 in the conscience. But, above all, cast a glance upon yourself, 
 and upon your own times, and remark how, in the stead of that 
 old formalism which has created beautiful forms, a lamentable 
 absence of form, a negative formalism, has crept in. You will 
 then become aware, that, in the stead of demonism, a sentimen- 
 tality has established itself, which draws down the mind to the 
 passivity of personal sensation, just as demonism degrades it to 
 the state of hypostatized unconscious nature. 
 
 But if you look a little closer into the ecclesiastical condition 
 of the two ages, are you not overpowered by one predominant 
 feeling ? And is this not the feeling, that in the one age we 
 find, upon the whole, connexion, reality, internal and external 
 truth ; in the other, little else but patchwork and ruins, shams 
 and phantoms ? That in one case a real life was lived, a life of 
 freedom, as to the Church and as to the individual ; that in the 
 other, conventionalism is fostered, or rather in most instances 
 maintained by fire and sword, by the tyranny of State Churches, 
 or by the unthinking superstition of habit ? and that such a state 
 
 I 4 
 
120 INTERPRETATION AND APPLICATION. 
 
 of things is most ill-advisedly vaunted as possessing vitality, 
 or even most impudently proclaims itself perfect and infallible ? 
 
 The ancient baptism comprised, on Gospel grounds, four 
 spiritual elements — instruction, examination, the vow, the ini- 
 tiation. To each of these elements was attached a sacred 
 symbol, an externally working act of the Church, who, by 
 means of her Bishops and Elders, ordained in the place of 
 God. To instruction, the blessing corresponded; to examin- 
 ation, the imposition of hands ; to confession, immersion in 
 water ; to the vow for life and for death, the unction as Priest 
 and King. Thus did the beggar enter into the communion of 
 the faithful ; thus the emperor, when he ventured to do so. 
 Constantino considered of it until his death-bed. 
 
 It is impossible but that this ceremony should have produced 
 a great general impression, which was not diminished if the 
 Initiated were the child of Christian parents. The act was his 
 own, as much as it was in the case of a convert from heathenism. 
 The very gradual advancement even of the age of baptism in 
 the case of children of Christian families, must have been 
 injurious to its character as a solemnity. We have already 
 seen how, even before the close of our period, the baptism of 
 new-born infants grew out of that of children advancing to- 
 wards the age of boyhood. We have seen how, from the 
 baptism of the Spirit, which Christ instituted, people relapsed 
 into ceremonial law, and fell back upon the shadow of a Jewish 
 custom, which had ceased to be binding with the extinction 
 of the nation, and now was made a sanction for the religion of 
 the new Covenant of Humanity. 
 
 In consequence of this alteration and complete subversion of 
 its main features, brought about principally by the Africans of 
 the third century, and completed by Augustin, these natural 
 elements have been, in the course of nearly fifteen centuries, 
 most tragically decomposed, and nothing is now remaining 
 anywhere but ruins. In the East people adhered to immersion, 
 although this symbol of Man voluntarily and consciously 
 making a vow of the sacrifice of self, lost all meaning in the 
 immersion of a new-born child. The Eastern Church, moreover, 
 practised the unction immediately after the immersion, although 
 
ANCIENT BAPTISM AND MODERN. 121 
 
 that unction implies, even more than immersion, Man's full 
 consciousness, and is to be the seal of a free pledge, of a 
 responsible act. Yet the Eastern Church requires, nevertheless, 
 the general recognition of both, as necessary to salvation, and 
 denies there is any efficacy in the Western form of baptism. 
 
 The Western Church evidently commenced her career, under 
 the guidance of Rome, with more freedom of thought. She 
 abolished, together with adult baptism, its symbol, immersion, 
 and introduced sprinkling in its stead. She retained, again, 
 unction, the chrisma, by way of confirmation, and separated the 
 two acts ; so that, at all events, a beginning of consciousness 
 and instruction may be assumed to be implied as a justification 
 of the subsequent ceremony. Yet with this she rigidly main- 
 tained in her teaching, as to the effect of the act of baptism, all 
 the consequences which the Gospel and the ancient Church so 
 undeniably and authentically connect with the previous in- 
 struction, and the voluntary conscious vow. The doctrine of 
 Augustin was completed and stereotyped by Thomas Aquinas. 
 The practice of the Latin Church has equally little correspond- 
 ence with the custom and spirit of the ancient, as regards 
 unction. The postponement of this solemnity is a recognition 
 of the principle ; but even the legal age of seven is much too 
 early a period to show that the ceremony is not to be an opus 
 operatum, but the voluntary act of the conscious mind. And 
 still the practice prevailing in exclusively Catholic countries, of 
 bringing children of four and five years old to the Bishop to be 
 confirmed, proves how little the proper idea to be conveyed by 
 the act is seriously attended to ; and more strongly still, how 
 little impression it has made on the popular mind. Whatever 
 improvement has been effected in this practice in France, and 
 to a still greater extent in Catholic Germany, by way of pre- 
 paration for the first Communion (the admission to which, 
 according to the idea of the ancient Church, is expressed 
 directly by the unction), is due, as history attests, to the 
 influence of the Reformation on the formation of popular 
 customs. 
 
 But what did the Reformation itself? The Reformers 
 retained the doctrine of Augustin, together with pedobaptism. 
 
122 INTERPRETATION AND APPLICATION. 
 
 It is true, nevertheless, that they regarded the baptism of new- 
 born infants merely as an oflfering, a dedication of the children 
 by their parents, as a vicarious act, and as the first step only 
 in a process which was actually to be completed by themselves 
 in riper years, after their Christian education was finished, 
 through their own voluntary confession and vow. We are 
 indebted to Luther especially for this correct conception, and 
 the having worthily and rationally carried it out is the most 
 blessed work of the Evangelical Church of the German nation. 
 Confirmation is, at the present moment, together with the 
 principle of intellectual liberty, the Bible and the hymns, the 
 principal means of keeping alive German Protestantism. But, 
 at the same time, the doctrine of the Sacraments did not admit 
 confirmation as one of them. Consequently, it was not held to 
 be necessary to salvation, because not prescribed by the Gospel, 
 which, however, is equally silent upon the subject of the 
 sprinkling of children. Thus the essential points in the Gospel 
 and in the practice of the Apostles, faith and self-sacrifice, have 
 been placed lower in the scale than the sprinkling, which was 
 adopted instead of the Jewish immersion, and the personal act 
 has been held in less estimation than its substitute. This may 
 be compatible with the Romish doctrine of good works, but is 
 as repugnant to the evangelical doctrine of justification by faith, 
 as it is to the precepts of the Gospel, and the practice of the 
 Apostles. The leathern scholasticism of the seventeenth century, 
 it is true, knew how to justify all that ; but, of this justification, 
 neither Scripture rightly interpreted, nor reason speaking its 
 own language, can take cognizance. 
 
 The Protestant Church in Germany fell besides into another 
 contradiction, inasmuch as she defended and admitted the 
 validity of confirmation, as being the Voluntary act of the 
 individual, and yet supported, with all her power, the inter- 
 ference of the State, by whose regulations no person can be 
 admitted into any trade or service, unless he can produce a 
 certificate of confirmation. 
 
 The Reformed Church,'which had no scruple in swallowing 
 the camel of pedobaptism, as being in harmony with Scripture, 
 found no place in its theological conscience for confirmation, 
 
ANCIENT BAPTISM AND MODERN. 123 
 
 because it was not prescribed in Scripture, was a human in- 
 vention. In the course of two centuries, wherever the two 
 Evangelical Confessions coexist, custom has corrected that 
 untenable theological one-sidedness, by the introduction of the 
 Lutheran confirmation, and this has been one of the many- 
 inward preparations to the union of the two Confessions. 
 
 The Enghsh Church, in her Articles, adopts the general 
 Evangelical doctrine of baptism in such a way as to place 
 human faith by the side of Divine grace (Art. 27. compared 
 with Art. 11.). She reconciles, moreover, the scholastic doctrine 
 which limits the efficacy of baptism to original sin, and excludes 
 from it all deadly sins committed after baptism, as well as the 
 fanatical view that persons once baptized can sin no more (Art. 
 16.). But in her Liturgy, exclusively and rigorously prescribed 
 since the end of the seventeenth century, she certainly uses 
 expressions which appear better suited to the Romish than the 
 Evangelical doctrine, and which have consequently become a 
 snare to many consciences, and a cause of constantly continuing 
 separation from the Church. Lastly, confirmation has been no 
 farther advanced, either doctrinally or practically, beyond the 
 point at which it was left at "the time of the separation from 
 the Church of Rome. The English Church, therefore, is not 
 only in this particular essentially unreformed, but considerably 
 behind the French, and especially behind the Roman Catholic 
 Church in German3\ Episcopal confirmation, notwithstanding 
 the zealous efforts of the prelates of the day, remains, as to its 
 essence and efficacy, an opus operatum. How this has reacted 
 on infant baptism is clear from the fact, that, among the lower 
 classes of the population of London, so many of those who 
 belong to the Establishment are either not baptized at all, or 
 never set their foot inside the Church again after baptism. 
 This also accounts for so many of its members never having 
 been confirmed. 
 
 It is unnecessary here to repeat how little foundation there 
 is in the ancient Church for the exclusive right of the Bishop 
 to confirm, which is the main hindrance to a radical reform. It 
 must not, however, be forgotten that it dates from a period in 
 which every town, however small, was a bishopric. 
 
124 INTERPRETATION AND APPLICATION. 
 
 Still less is it to be wondered at, that such a Church has 
 given birth to the sects of Quakers and Baptists. The former 
 of these consider external baptism as a Jewish custom, to be no 
 longer binding after the downfall of the Jewish people ; and 
 the abuse to which it had led dangerous, if not fatal. The 
 Baptists have restored adult baptism. But, as in the first case 
 the negation of the form has grown into a formality ; so, in the 
 latter, has the restoration of an old form. The Baptists find it 
 difiicult to understand that the idea of the German Protestant 
 act of baptism, which concludes with the vow and benediction, 
 corresponds exactly with the idea of the Gospel commandment, 
 the letter of which they push to such an extent ; and, under the 
 yoke of an utterly one-sided rigid Calvinism, they are inclined 
 to attach to their own form a superstitious power, by which the 
 efficacy of a continually renewed faith is thrown into the back- 
 ground. 
 
 But how little the Churches of the seventeenth century can 
 make head against the onsets of the Baptists, in countries 
 where a great and free religious movement exists, is evinced by 
 the fact, that, among serious Christians of the English race in 
 the United States, the Baptists or Congregational preachers are 
 on the increase more than any other sect, so that they form 
 already the most numerous and most progressive community. 
 
 How much mischief and injury are inflicted on the life of the 
 Church in general by this and similar separations, will appear 
 upon a comparison of the parish schools of the English Con- 
 gregations and those of the Apostolical Church. In the ancient 
 Church every thing is based upon congregational life and 
 instruction. In England, many of the noblest elements are 
 withdrawn from the National Church, and the seceding con- 
 gregations languish in consequence of isolation, and suflTer still 
 more by the pride of being the Elect. The former has never 
 established parish schools as a national institution, the latter 
 have never striven after national life. 
 
 Neither as regards German and Continental parish schools in 
 general, is a glance at that picture calculated to flatter our 
 pride. The palsy of the life of the Church, and the decay of 
 the spirit of a free Christian community, are but too manifestly 
 exhibited by the prevalence of police regulations. 
 
125 
 
 III. 
 
 THE MORAL APPLICATION TO THE CHURCH OP THE FUTURE. 
 
 This is the picture, and this is the mirror. If the former be 
 true and the latter faithful, it is high time to proceed to the 
 work of restoration. As we have met everywhere with traces 
 of death and of decay, so we have discovered on the other hand 
 that the germs and scions of future life have not altogether 
 become extinct. Who desires to establish what is dead ? Who 
 can wish to eradicate the germs of life ? Who can revivify the 
 former, however desirable it may be thought? Who can 
 prevent the latter from increasing, however dangerous such a 
 growth may be to the existing order of things ? 
 
 Upon closer and deeper reflection, it will appear wise to 
 retain pedobaptism, but to remodel the whole baptismal 
 discipline on the following principles. 
 
 1. To this end, in the first place, the doctrine of biblical 
 baptism must be reformed in the sense of the German Church, 
 and of the doctrinal works of Schleiermacher, Neander, Nitzsch, 
 and the German school in general. According to this view, 
 our act of baptism forms a whole, the commencement of which 
 is the sprinkling of the child, the conclusion the pledge of the 
 grown up and instructed young Christian, sealed by a blessing. 
 
 2. In the second place, the superstition that such children 
 of Christian parents, as die of tender age unbaptized, are under 
 damnation, from which they must be rescued by baptism, is to 
 be put down for ever by bringing forward its true corrective. 
 
 3. This can only be done by positively and practically 
 realizing the idea, that the baptism of new-born children is the 
 outward sign of the vow of the parents to dedicate their child 
 to God, as His gift intrusted to them, and to prepare it by a 
 Christian education for becoming a member of the Christian 
 
126 INTERPEETATION AND APPLICATION. 
 
 Church until it be itself able to profess the faith in Christ, and 
 to make the vow of a godly life dedicated to God and the 
 brethren. 
 
 4. Further, at the performance of the ceremony, the duty 
 imposed upon parents and sponsors, as sureties for the Christian 
 education of the child at home and at school, must be brought 
 more prominently forward ; while, on the other hand, every 
 expression must be omitted or modified which is only appro- 
 priate to cases where the person to be baptized takes the pledge 
 himself, and which never ought to have been transferred from 
 the ceremony of adult to that of infant baptism. 
 
 5. The act of baptism must again become a congregational 
 and Church festival, which cannot surely be effected solely by 
 the circumstance of the ceremony being performed in the 
 church. 
 
 6. The taking children to school and to church must be 
 treated as an act of the life of the whole community, as it was 
 in the Apostolical Church. 
 
 7. The confirmation must be performed with all the serious- 
 ness and solemnity which are usual in the German Evangelical 
 Church. 
 
 On these fundamental assumptions the following principal 
 heads of practical reform might be proposed for the present 
 National Church communities whenever they resolve to enter 
 upon a thorough reformation. 
 
 1. As in the ancient Church, baptismal festivals should be 
 instituted. The ancient Church selected for this purpose Easter 
 and Whitsuntide ; to which, here and there, the festival of the 
 Epiphany was added as representing the baptism of Christ. 
 The most natural arrangement would be, the institution of 
 FOUR BAPTISMAL FESTIVALS, three of them at the Christmas, 
 Easter, and Whitsuntide holidays, the fourth on a Sunday in 
 the autumn, or on the first Sunday in Advent, as being the 
 beginning of the ecclesiastical year. In proposing such an 
 arrangement it is supposed that on each of these days all 
 children who have been born in the intermediate time will be 
 baptized. The thanksgiving of mothers would most naturally 
 
BAPTISM IN CHURCH OF THE FUTURE. 127 
 
 form a part of such a congregational festival, and constitute a 
 visible bond of sisterhood amongst the mothers, whatever might 
 be their rank. 
 
 2. On each of these' festivals the candidates for baptism, with 
 their parents and sponsors, should be considered as a baptismal 
 CONGREGATION, and the ceremony as a common one, and as a 
 portion of the Church service of the congregation. 
 
 3. The same days should also be the festivals of introduc- 
 tion of baptized children who have attained their seventh year, 
 the time at which they generally enter the boys' and girls' 
 school. The children of both sexes should, if possible, be 
 introduced by their parents and sponsors as a school con- 
 gregation, to be admitted with prayer and blessing, and an 
 exhortation setting forth that the object of the instruction they 
 are now about to receive is to prepare them for confirmation. 
 
 4. Instead of either excluding altogether from Sunday service 
 the children who are thus introduced into the Church (the 
 school children who are passing from the stage of infancy to 
 that of puberty), or disgusting them with it by making them 
 listen to sermons they cannot understand, and which are in 
 some respects totally unfitted for them, a school service should 
 be established for the younger ones, which, being short and 
 congenial to their feelings, might make an impression and be 
 beneficial to them. 
 
 5. Confirmation should be conducted essentially according 
 to the custom and the Liturgical formularies of the German 
 Lutheran Church, which cannot be surpassed in dignity and 
 solemnity. In a note (B.) to this Part, one of these composed 
 from the ancient formularies is appended, to which is added 
 that agreed upon for the confirmation of German Catechumens 
 at Jerusalem. As to the age for confirmation, the fourteenth 
 birthday should be considered as the earliest : the custom of the 
 Reformed Church, not to allow young persons to be prepared 
 for the first communion before eighteen, is, on the whole, the 
 safer one. 
 
 How far, and in what way, the episcopal element may be 
 brought into prominence in this arrangement, will depend upon 
 
128 INTERPRETATION AND APPLICATION. 
 
 the constitution of each particular Church : it is clear, however, 
 that this idea may be also realized by a collegiate cooperation 
 of ministers placed upon an equal footing. 
 
 There are, however, two conditions indispensable to all such 
 reforms. The first is the cessation of all religious persecution 
 and all State-Church compulsion, and the recognition of the 
 congregation of communicants as the organ of the Spirit in the 
 Church. The second is the abolition of exclusion from a Church 
 on account of difference in forms. I do not see for what good 
 internal reason the Baptists, as such, can be excluded from a 
 National Church. Those who give a preference to adult baptism 
 (and the number of such persons, under a reformed system, 
 would be very small, at least where the German language is 
 spoken) should no more be looked upon as heretics on that 
 account, than Baptists, on their part, should stigmatize by that 
 name such congregations as have a preference for infant-baptism. 
 As to the Society of Friends, it certainly can only be said by 
 ignorant people that they reject baptism altogether : for they 
 most stringently insist upon spiritual baptism in the sense of 
 the Gospel, the being immersed and buried with Christ. The 
 misunderstanding which is the origin of their discontinuance of 
 baptism has arisen, according to the law of reaction, from the 
 prevalence of a materialistic view of baptism in the National 
 Church out of which that Society took its origin. That mis- 
 understanding can only be removed by bringing out in all its 
 force the spirit of the original institution. 
 
BOOK II. 
 
 THE CONSTITUTION AND GOVERNMENT OF THE 
 CHRISTIAN CHURCH. 
 
 I. 
 
 THE PICTURE. 
 
 Here I shall be able to be more brief than I was in the First 
 Book, respecting the sense of the Ordinances. The genuine 
 and ancient customs and ordinances, which are collected in the 
 Church- and House-Book of the Apostolical Church, as well as 
 in the Christian code, fully explain themselves, and their dif- 
 ference from the canonical law of the more modern hierarchy 
 requires no comment. Nor have I much to say in detail re- 
 specting the practical application of the picture to our own 
 times. My views on this subject are fully expressed in two 
 previous works. I may, therefore, venture to confine myself 
 here to general outlines from the point of view of Universal 
 History. 
 
 The constitution of the Christian Church, like the political 
 constitution of the Germanic races, rested upon the idea of a 
 community freely submitting to a divine order of society which 
 calls mankind to freedom, and makes man free. Christianity 
 was a free, and in a certain sense, a secret, association. Already 
 Moses had based his reform upon such an association. At a 
 time when Egypt was suffering under the most iron despotism, 
 and when the Aramaic races of Asia were in a state of the most 
 revolting religious and moral debasement, he formed a free 
 people, and a people of God, by organising it first as a secret 
 religious community. It was by this agency that he threw off 
 
 VOL. II. K 
 
130 INTERPRETATION AND APPLICATION. 
 
 the bondage of an empire mighty both in Africa and Asia, and 
 united the tribes of Israel, who were dissevered and trodden 
 under foot, into a nation of universal historical importance. 
 Jesus and his disciples formed a secret society first out of the 
 children of that nation, at the last turning point of its history, 
 when subjected to the most cruel despotism of republican em- 
 perors, and amid the despair of a highly civilized but dissolute 
 world. This society was based upon the freedom of its members 
 from the Levitical law, on their equality as children of God, on 
 their brotherhood as men. It was this society, established upon 
 this freedom, this equality, and this fraternity, which dissolved 
 the greatest empire in the world, and led to the formation of a 
 vast association, embracing the whole human family throughout 
 the world-wide dominions of Rome. After this association had, 
 in the course of ages, formed Christian nations and states, and 
 by their means remodelled Europe and the world, it fell into 
 internal confusion, and became either petrified or decayed. All 
 the movements of the last three hundred years tend towards a 
 fearful dilemma : either a serious, judicious, conscious reform 
 must be made in the Christian community of Western Europe, 
 or the dissolution of the fundamental elements of society will 
 be eiFected by social revolutions. There are countries, even 
 now, where Socialism is the only sign of constitutional and 
 religious life in the consciousness of the people. Socialism, 
 however, is nothing but the demoniacal caricature of the original 
 Christian Association, reflected by the concave mirror of hatred 
 against the selfishness, luxury, and Mammon-worship of the 
 higher classes. Christianity saved the old world from this mis- 
 fortune, by bringing the Elect, through faith in God and in 
 man, into a new world ; but the passage lay over the ruins of 
 existing states and civilization. The ancient world perished by 
 the birth-throes of Christianity : ours, if not reformed, will 
 perish by convulsions attending its decay. There is no other 
 real sign given to our generation but this. The consideration 
 of the picture of the religious and moral conditions which the 
 constitution of the earliest Christian communities offers is on 
 that account no idle question, but one of immediate interest 
 and vital importance to the present age. 
 
CONSTITUTION AND GOVERNMENT. 131 
 
 Every town-congregation of ancient Christianity, the con- 
 stitution of which we have to delineate, was a Church. The 
 constitution of that Church was a congregational constitution. 
 In St Paul's Epistles, in the writings of Clemens Romanus, of 
 Ignatius, and of Polycarp, the congregation is the highest organ 
 of the spirit as well as power of the Church. It is the body of 
 Christ, the embodiment of the person of Jesus of Nazareth in 
 the society which was founded by Him, and through faith in 
 Him. This congregation was governed and directed by a Council 
 of Elders, which congregational council, at a later period, was 
 presided over, in most Churches, by a governing overseer, the 
 Bishop. But the ultimate decision, in important emergencies, 
 rested with the whole congregation. The bishop and elders 
 were its superintending members ; its guides, but not its 
 masters. 
 
 In most of the customs and ordinances transmitted to us, we 
 find this active interference on the part of the congregation 
 considerably weakened. Already a hierarchy has been esta- 
 blished. Nevertheless the congregation elects its Bishop, and 
 invites the bishops of the neighbouring localities to institute 
 him into his office with prayer and the imposition of hands. If 
 the congregation is still to be formed, the bishop names the 
 Elders, three at least, and inducts them with prayer and a 
 benediction. They form with him the Congregational Council. 
 The bishop elects at least one Deacon, as his assistant ; and 
 appoints widows and young women to take care, both spiritually 
 and bodily, of the orphans, the sick, and the poor. If the 
 bishopric of a congregation, already formed, become vacant, the 
 form of episcopal election remains the same : the clergy elect 
 with the people ; there is no form of election prescribed, con- 
 sequently none is excluded. If the office of Presbyter is vacant, 
 sometimes the bishop and clergy, sometimes the whole con- 
 gregation, fill it up. The bishop consecrates the presbyters, 
 as he is himself consecrated by his brother bishops. Their 
 ordination (dedication to God by prayer, with imposition of 
 hands) is the same : only that the elders have no throne, or 
 raised chair, in the apse at the end of the church, but sit upon 
 benches on both sides. Between the clergy and the congrega- 
 
 K 2 
 
132 INTERPRETATION AND APPLICATION. 
 
 tion stands the communion-table, their bond of union and con- 
 necting link. 
 
 The hypothesis, therefore, of the Presbyterian Divines of the 
 sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, that the Bishop, as the 
 first of his peers (^jmmus inter pai-es), sprang from the elders of 
 the congregation, falls to the ground as unhistorical. But their 
 idea of Elders, as both an officiating and ruling body, is quite 
 correct. The ancient Church knows no more of a single Pres- 
 byter than of clerical government and election. It was only in 
 very small places, manors (villce), that the collegiate form was 
 not adopted. There, a single clergyman, who, according to the 
 use of the word Bishop in the Epistles of St. Peter and St. Paul, 
 was called a Country Bishop (chorepiscopus, i. e. country curate), 
 managed the small community in its ordinary emergencies. His 
 powers were limited, because he had not the assistance of a 
 Church council. 
 
 The Lutheran view, again, especially that of the German 
 Lutherans, according to which the clergy formed the order of 
 teachers in the ancient Church, is entirely erroneous. The 
 Church was a government, and the Bishop and Elders were 
 magistrates ; they directed the congregation, but without legis- 
 lative power. Teaching and praying were open to every one 
 in the Church of the Apostles ; every man acting as a priest 
 and anointed of the Lord. According to our ordinances the 
 laity may still teach the Catechumens, dismiss them even with 
 the blessing from the public service ; for all (it is said) have 
 the spirit of the Lord. The first act of the newly baptized, on 
 entering into the congregation, is to give, or respond to, the 
 episcopal greeting of Peace, or the benediction. 
 
 The nature of things, however, led, as early as the second 
 century, to collective congregations. The small village com- 
 munities in the vicinity of the town, already, to a certain extent, 
 formed such an association with those of the city. This, how- 
 ever, was only the first, and an imperfect arrangement ; because 
 the integral parts, with the exception of the town, had no 
 complete organization. The principal towns in the then existing 
 provinces of the empire (and all the Apostolic Epistles are 
 addressed to these) formed central points for the province or 
 
CONSTITUTION AND GOVERNMENT. 133 
 
 island, as mother towns or metropolises. The bishops assem- 
 bled there in synod. Believers had the liberty of attending 
 their sittings and hearing the discussions. The first bishop, in 
 age or importance, presided. 
 
 As to Rome, Alexandria, and Antioch, however, the bishops 
 had in early times incorporated with them a more considerable 
 portion of the province. To Alexandria, the whole of Egypt, 
 Libya, and the Pentapolis were united. We have, therefore, 
 three different groups of Church jurisdiction : the town and 
 adjacent villages ; the principal and inferior towns of the island 
 or province; and the great metropolis, with the entire province 
 in the widest sense. Already, in the most restricted of these 
 spheres, each individual portion was a complete Church in 
 itself. Thus, we find the suburban towns incorporated with 
 Rome ; Tusculum and Praeneste, Tibur and Velitrae, Ostia and 
 Portus, each of them a bishopric. It is clear from the words of 
 Hippolytus that there was no further extension of the Roman 
 Church in his time. He makes no allusion whatever to the ju- 
 risdiction of Rome over the Suburbicarian provinces placed under 
 the Vicarius urbis ; that is, all the South of Italy and the 
 Islands, and Central Italy as far as the Apennines, inclusive of 
 Umbria and Tuscany. This stage of the development, there- 
 fore, belongs only to the end of our period, the close of the 
 third and beginning of the fourth century. The Roman Church 
 at the beginning of the third century had not yet become the 
 Italian (in our sense), still less the Latin Church. 
 
 Now the circumstance in this ecclesiastical organization, 
 which is of general historical interest, is this. The congrega- 
 tional element, which had united towns and villages, and had 
 once formed the connecting link between the Churches of Jeru- 
 salem and of Antioch, did not extend to these wider relations. 
 Rome and the adjacent towns were connected together, not by 
 their congregations, nor even by their Church councils, but 
 simply and solely by their bishops. In order to provide for 
 their common wants, the bishops of these towns entered into the 
 Council of the metropolitan congregation, which, in this way, 
 exercised a certain jurisdiction over the other portions of the 
 collective congregation. In this sense, and this. only, can the 
 
 K 3 
 
134 INTERPRETATION AND APPLICATION. 
 
 thirty -fifth Apostolical Canon be understood. It is the germ 
 of that subsequent metropolitan system, which is exhibited in 
 the decrees of Nicsea (325) and of Antioch (341) in a more de- 
 veloped shape. The " nations " which assemble round their 
 •* first " bishop, and act in common with him, are precisely the 
 districts of the Hellenic and Roman world which form a nation 
 in the antique sense, together with their chief town (like 
 Corinth, Ephesus, Alexandria, Antioch, and Rome). I have 
 discussed at length, in my " Ignatian Letters," what was the 
 peculiar development of this germ in the second century in 
 Egypt. The Egyptian collection of Apostolic Ordinances, 
 which has come to light since that publication, furnishes direct 
 proof, that the consecration of the bishop of Alexandria by the 
 clergy of his Church was a unique instance of that kind in 
 Egypt ; and that the metropolitan position of that capital did 
 not in the least degree stand in the way of the independent 
 episcopal organization of each individual town-congregation. 
 
 The Churches which grouped themselves round a great 
 Church, stood in an organic, but strictly hierarchical connexion 
 with it. It was natural that common interests should be treated 
 of in common, and decided upon under the presidency of the 
 bishop of the metropolis. The other bishops were joint elders 
 in this council. They formed, with the parish clergy of the 
 capital, the presbytery of the chief bishop. This is the origin 
 of the College of Cardinals. 
 
 This second stage in the development of the Church's consti- 
 tution is, therefore, already infected with the decay of the times. 
 There were no longer then any real nations, but only municipal 
 unions. The ancient world did not know a free nation beyond 
 the municipal limits, and therefore had no representative go- 
 vernment. Christianity prepared this by clerical senates and 
 synods : it could not create nations. The congregation was 
 free, and her life the only living and free life of the age. But 
 this free element in the Christian community remains within the 
 narrow limits of the municipal constitution ; all beyond that is 
 unfree, as regards the congregations. Independent and auto- 
 nomic in their parochial concerns, the congregations are excluded 
 from the general Church affairs. 
 
CONSTITUTION AND GOVERNMENT. 135 
 
 But it is these precisely which became every day of more and 
 more importance. In proportion as the relations grew more 
 complicated, and the differences upon points of doctrine more 
 serious, and in proportion as more stress was laid upon doctri- 
 nal forms, as symbols of the Church and conditions of Cliurch 
 communion, its government and destinies fell, more and more, 
 into the hands of the bishop. 
 
 The connexion between the Church and the State was a 
 purely negative one, and thereby necessarily hostile. The in- 
 dividual Church, whether in Rome or Jerusalem, Alexandria or 
 Antioch, enjoyed a limited right of protection, as the Jews do 
 at the present day in Rome. This was associated with harsh 
 treatment of every description, and became, from time to time, 
 not merely a grievous oppression, but cruel and bloody persecu- 
 tion ; as in the case of the Jews in the middle ages. Christianity 
 enjoined respect towards the ruling powers, as the administrators 
 of the Divine order, and love towards them as well as towards 
 all other enemies, but expressly also as such. For the same 
 Christianity considered all the earthly empires of the day as in- 
 struments of the Prince of Darkness, ordained by God for 
 punishment ; and, at the very head of the Christian view of the 
 world stood the belief that all these must perish, in order that 
 the kingdom of God, the final object of the " good tidings " to 
 enslaved humanity, might appear. The hatred of the Jews, as 
 the people of God, towards all their oppressors, passed on to all 
 Christians, strengthened by the power of love towards the 
 brethren of the free society of the children of God. They 
 prayed for princes and for emperors, but their warmest prayer, 
 their most fervent supplication, " Thy kingdom come," was for 
 the speedy dissolution of this world of evil, with Satan and all 
 his tormentors. In order fully to estimate the force of this feel- 
 ing, we must realize to our minds the fact that the community 
 of the Roman empire, and its right of citizenship, even before 
 the time of Hippolytus, wonderfully favoured the idea of the 
 Catholic (universal) Church. This idea was based on the 
 original fundamental view of Christianity, but the Christians 
 could not become fully conscious of it until the total destruction 
 of Jerusalem under Hadrian. This momentous moral event 
 
 K 4 
 
136 INTERPRETATION AND APPLICATION. 
 
 brought the kingdom of God face to face with the kingdom of 
 this world : the Universal Church did not even recognize the 
 limits of the kingdom of this world as its own. Now this king- 
 dom of God had no people beyond the municipal sphere ; just 
 as the kingdom of this world, beyond that sphere, had no na- 
 tions. There only remained administrative districts, which 
 were termed Provinces, with the addition, after the time of 
 Constantine, of the combination into Dioceses (in the political 
 sense) and Prefectures. 
 
 The old world was doomed to fall into decay, and to do so by 
 means of the dissolving agency of Christianity. Christianity 
 was to prepare the way for a new world, but, in its then organ- 
 ization, it must necessarily suffer from the calamity of the age, 
 the want of national life. Instead of the defunct municipalities 
 whose burdensome offices were avoided, as they now are in 
 many parts of the Continent, it established in the towns 
 Church authorities, animated with the internal life of a free 
 people (populus means congregation), whereas the municipal 
 corporations were bodies of police functionaries, almost as much 
 as in modern France. It extended the free union to the neigh- 
 bouring country population, and even to the country towns 
 which were adjacent to a capital. But here, already, the con- 
 gregational element remained unrepresented, and thus a national 
 Church-union could no more be formed than a political nation. 
 There existed, at that time, only the life of the corporations ; 
 and, beyond that, Christianity could not advance in its re- 
 organizing social process. To represent this impossibility as 
 the final aim, the standard for all ages, is almost as rational as 
 the Jesuitical theory of Ludwig Von Haller, according to which 
 monarchy does not allow of a State society, nor of a State law, 
 the State itself being nothing but a conglomeration of private 
 rights, of corporations and personalities, grouping themselves 
 round a factitious personality, reigning by the grace of God 
 (represented by the Pope). 
 
 Although there existed a clerical hierarchy in the congre- 
 gation, a person might become an elder without having been a 
 deacon, a bishop without having been consecrated as elder. All 
 the clergy, besides, might marry like other Christians ; only on 
 
CONSTITUTION AND GOVERNMENT. 137 
 
 the election of a bishop or elder, proof was required that he had 
 been but once married ; a second marriage being considered 
 contrary to the injunction of the Apostle in the First Epistle 
 to Timothy (iii. 2.). 
 
 From this objection to a second marriage, which, perhaps, 
 originated in a misunderstanding, a rule was gradually formed 
 which Hippolytus held to be a law of the Church, in opposition 
 to the Romish bishop Callistus : that every one who was un- 
 married at the time of his entry into the clerical office (i. e. 
 becoming bishop, elder, or even deacon) was precluded from 
 marrying so long as he retained his office. The authentic 
 history of this gradual alteration is clear from the interpolations 
 which were made, on this point, in the most ancient collections 
 of the Christian Canons, as fully appears from the table prefixed 
 to our text of the same. The key to it, however, is to be looked 
 for nowhere else than in the want of organic development of the 
 congregational life, and in the exclusive claims of the clergy, 
 which thereby became more and more established. Both again 
 were intrinsically due to the wretchedness of the age, to tlie 
 decline of all social life in the Hellenic and Roman world, and 
 to the transformation of a commonwealth into the all-destroying 
 and overwhelming military despotism of the emperors. 
 
 The stagnation of congregational life exhibits itself also but 
 too clearly in the gradual displacement of the fundamental 
 notions about Christian offices. As the bishop was the exclu- 
 sive director in all matters not congregational but ecclesiastical, 
 so were the elders in the congregational. Still the principle of 
 collegiate power and action was retained, as well as that of the 
 independence of the smaller in the collective congregations. 
 
 The most valuable portion, moreover, of the action of the 
 congregations was preserved, namely, that of the services of 
 charity. The office of Deacon or helper implies, in the full 
 sense of the word, the attendance on the poor and the sick. To 
 offi^r spiritual as well as bodily aid, and, indeed, to supply all 
 common wants, was the individual duty of every Christian; and 
 this divine idea of services of charity had so deeply pervaded 
 the mind of the Church, that the office of deacon and deaconess 
 grew out of it. The latter were ordinarily widows, and the 
 
138 INTERPRETATION AND APPLICATION. 
 
 sisterhood of Widows is nothing more than that of Deaconesses. 
 The recently recovered Coptic collection of Apostolical Church 
 Ordinances furnishes most precious and original information 
 upon this point also. The deacons had the charge of the poor, 
 the deaconesses of the sick, and they attended indiscriminately 
 upon those who stood in need of their consolation and assist- 
 ance. A significant Egyptian legend attributes to Christ a 
 speech addressed by Him to Mary and Martha, in a sense 
 which, at all events, is deeply Christian and strictly Apostolical 
 (1 Pet. iii. 7.), namely, that, in the Christian community, 
 woman's weaker nature, when strengthened and elevated by the 
 respect and honour of the man, developes a new and peculiar 
 power, namely, that of serving and suffering Love. 
 
 The opulent provided for their poor ; to which purpose the 
 gifts offered at the common table, which became an altar as the 
 symbol of a vow of self-dedication, were especially applied. It 
 was a part of the system of community of goods among the early 
 Christians, which had remained as a sacred custom. The first 
 fruits of corn and wine, and whatever was titheable of the 
 produce of the earth, served for the maintenance of the clergy. 
 In all our Collections, the validity of the Apostolic injunction 
 on that head is recognized ; and especially the one, " Thou 
 shalt not muzzle the ox which treadeth out the corn." In the 
 re-written text of the first Greek Collection also, this precept is 
 applied as signifying, that as the oxen by that means do not eat 
 ■up all the corn on the threshing-floor, so the clergy should only 
 appropriate to themselves a very small portion of the gifts of the 
 congregation, or Church property. 
 
139 
 
 II. 
 
 THE REFLEX. 
 
 Here, again, no existing Church community comes up to that 
 which is exhibited in the early Christian Churches, as the 
 substance and aim of the idea of Christ and his Apostles. 
 But in each of them remains and fragments are extant, 
 conscious or unconscious, intentional or accidental reminiscences ; 
 in many of them even the germs of future life. And, besides, 
 these fifteen centuries have had to struggle with an entirely new 
 problem : the relation of the Church to a Christian State. 
 This is the Gordian knot of modern Europe, easy to be cut, 
 but impossible to be loosed except by Christian liberty being 
 made the law of the land in Church and State. 
 
 The Greek Church, that is to say, the Church of Byzantium, 
 which, after having oppressed all the national Churches in Sj^ria, 
 Egypt, and Assyria, rules over the ruins of the Byzantine 
 empire and the vast and aspiring empire of Russia, hitherto 
 only offers the stereotyped form of a system of discipline and of 
 metropolitan government. The rigid Church discipline, with 
 its penances and penalties, arose out of the spiritual superintend- 
 ence of each brother by the congregation : in like manner, the 
 right of permanent or temporary exclusion, which we find in 
 the Byzantine metropolitan system, was developed out of the 
 power which the congregational unions of the ante-Nicene 
 period possessed. The priests were the heirs of the congregation. 
 
 As in the Eastern, so in the Western Church, which was 
 formed round the old capital of the Western Empire of Rome, 
 the clergy is the ruling corporation. Only, as there the Bishop 
 and Metropolitan, so here the Pope is supreme ; synods and 
 councils fall more and more into the background. In each, 
 also, the despotic form of ecclesiastical sway has prevailed over 
 the lay form of government, and is, again, essentially influenced 
 
140 INTERPRETATION' AND ArPLICATION. 
 
 by the despotism of the princes and nobles, which has become 
 the state. In the West, however, man has had strength enough 
 to make one despotism a check upon the other ; in early days, 
 the temporal upon the spiritual ; in modern times, reversing 
 the principle, the spiritual upon the temporal. In other words, 
 the 02)pressed or repulsed spirit of freedom has instinctively 
 used, sometimes a Pope, sometimes an Emperor, as its protector 
 and tool. 
 
 Rome, in the nomination of Bishops, as everywhere else, 
 makes the direct reverse of the Apostolical institution the 
 principle of her Canon law. In her eyes, the episcopal power 
 emanates from the papal, and the Pope ought strictly, as matter 
 of right, to nominate all Bishops. Where this is not the case, 
 it arises from usurpation, or special arrangement and treaty 
 (concordat). This is, in principle, the same absolutism which, 
 five centuries later, made its appearance in a temporal form. 
 The clergy, which at first dispossessed the laity, and after- 
 wards oppressed them, fell in consequence under the yoke of 
 the Bishops ; and these again under that of the Popes ; the 
 Princes shared with the latter tlie spoil, as soon as they felt 
 them.selves strong enough. The monastic orders formed the 
 only free societies in this despotic system, but even they, by 
 little and little, fell under the general thraldom. 
 
 Here, again, the Reformation established the saving principle 
 of liberty, and the correct basis of a universal priesthood. But 
 the avidity of princes, the thirst for plunder on the part of the 
 nobility, the rage of the anti-reforming powers, and that decay 
 of civilization among the people which was the result of the 
 religious wars in Germ.any and France, rendered all free deve- 
 lopment in the leading countries of Europe impossible. The 
 rage of controversy among divines made the people indifferent 
 to ecclesiastical matters, and the jurist, as usual, framed for the 
 princes a divine right out of usurpation. It is only the nine- 
 teenth century, after various reforms and revolutions, that has 
 awakened the two great germs of life in the Evangelical Church : 
 the missions to foreign countries, and the Diaconate in the old 
 sense, or the so-called Home or Inner Mission. Tlie restoration 
 of the Institute of Deaconesses (not by the French, as has 
 
EXISTING CnURCH CONSTITUTIONS. 141 
 
 lately been said in England, but by Germans) is a remarkably 
 significant feature. Both have led to combinations and asso- 
 ciations in Church life, beyond the limits of municipal life. 
 The union of the two Protestant confessions (the Lutheran and 
 the Reformed) with Synods composed of laity and clergy, in the 
 greater part of Protestant Germany, is a vast step in the right 
 direction. But Synods cannot govern ; and, without Christian 
 self-government, the very principle of vitality is wanting. The 
 torpid Lutheranism of the Swedish Church has, like the whole 
 constitutional life of that nation, out-lived itself, and is waiting 
 for reanimation by means of the indestructible vitality of the 
 Northmen. The Danish Episcopacy is a mere state-machine. 
 So were the bishops nominated for the coronation of the first 
 king of Prussia, who stood there without father and without 
 children, and melted away like a dream. The only hope of life 
 for the new Prussian Episcopate is the possibility of its entering 
 into an organic connexion with the truly vital and national 
 element, the Synods, a connexion which at present does not 
 exist. 
 
 The English Churcli, beyond the parochial cure of souls 
 which is now on the whole excellent, has practically lost the 
 constitutional institutions of med ieval Catholic government, 
 with the exception of the Episcopate, and has not acquired one 
 single element of Protestant, nor consequently of Apostolical, 
 constitutional life. She establishes Catholic hierarchism with- 
 out its hierarchical independence in reference to the state, and 
 professes Protestant principles without being able to show any 
 of their faults in this domain. But she has preserved in the 
 idea of the Episcopacy, as the constitutional kingship in the 
 spiritual community, the natural and genuine Germanic organ 
 of self-government! and it is to be hoped she will maintain it, 
 if ever the spirit of Church reform should take possession of the 
 English people by a national movement. The Congregation, 
 or Parish, have no ecclesiastical rights ; because the law of the 
 Church is still the Canon law of the old clerical corporation. 
 By a mysterious interpolation of the original draft of the 
 Articles, as agreed upon in the Convocation of 1571, " tlie 
 Church " (which according to the Ecclesiastical Law is the 
 
142 INTERPRETATION AND APPLICATION. 
 
 Clergy in Convocation) " hath the power to decree Rites or 
 Ceremonies, and authority in controversies of Faith." (Note 
 C.) The Colonial is a truly missionary Church. In the 
 Foreign Mission of the Church the number of English mission- 
 aries is still insufficient. Home Mission the Church has none, 
 but that of the Scripture Readers in the metropolis and in 
 Ireland. The Diaconate is extinct. The Dissenters have no 
 national institutions, but much discipline and congregational 
 life. The only fruitful union between Church and Dissent, 
 besides the Greek Bible Society, is in the City Mission, a noble 
 form of Home Mission, although less complete than the German. 
 The spirit of political liberty which pervades the nation supplies, 
 to a certain extent, the want of ecclesiastical freedom. 
 
 Scotland is what Holland would be without the spiritual 
 influence of Germany ; a rigid, although a morally highly 
 respectable, Presbyterianism of the seventeenth century. In 
 this Presbyterianism, howevei', the element of hierarchism, in a 
 popular garb, is so predominant, that lately a dispute as to the 
 supreme decision upon what is spiritual and what is temporal, 
 in a mixed question of rights, has been turned into a vital 
 question of communion with Christ, and made a source of bitter 
 separation. Such a view has essentially a papistic element in 
 it; with this difference, indeed, that the Church does not 
 combat a foreign despotic legislation, but her own national 
 legalit}'. There is no other way of explaining this strange 
 phenomenon (in which, nevertheless, the most noble heroism 
 has manifested itself), but by the circumstance, that, in con- 
 sequence of the atrocious persecutions and oppressions of the 
 popular element by English supremacy and hierarchical epi- 
 scopacy in the seventeenth century, and by an unjust law of 
 patronage passed after the union in the eighteenth, the State is 
 still viewed in the light of an enemy by the popular Church. 
 
 All these phenomena, however, can only be fully accounted 
 for by the incredible confusion respecting the relation between 
 the Church and State ; that is to say, between the nation as an 
 ecclesiastical body and the nation as a political body ; a con- 
 fusion which continues to this hour. It is the history of the 
 struggle between two usurping or dictatorial powers: a long 
 
EXISTING CHURCH CONSTITUTIONS. 143 
 
 history of sorrow and suffering, in the course of which we meet 
 the scaffold and the stake. 
 
 A century after Hippolytus, Christianity became, under 
 Constantine, from a persecuted sect, a recognized religion, and, 
 with the passing -exception of Julian, the religion of the rulers, 
 and of the imperial army by which they governed. 
 
 Even before the end of the fourth century it was the dominant 
 religion, and the Catholic Church enjoyed exclusive privileges. 
 From the time of Theodosius downwards, the emperors carried 
 out a system of persecution, and the bishops rivalled them in 
 an almost Apocalyptic manner. Christianity was from the 
 very beginning admitted into the empire as an episcopal and 
 Catholic corporation, which centred more and more round the 
 great imperial cities of Rome (and New-Rome), Alexandria, 
 and Antioch. The Protector considered the bishops partly in 
 the light of helpmates, partly in the light of subjects ; and this 
 is the point of a convivial joke of the emperor Constantine, 
 which has been immortalized by Eusebius, comparing himself 
 with the bishops as an Episcopus (overseer) of the external 
 affairs of the State. His system was despotic monarchy, so was 
 theirs. It is just as rational to build upon this a right of 
 supremacy, as it is to establish the theory of passive obedience, 
 and the right divine of absolute princes, by referring to 
 Christian governments the words of the Gospel and Apostles 
 meant for Nero and Neronian prefects. Constantine was the 
 first, but already a complete, Byzantine despot, and would have 
 remained so had he survived his baptism. The first result of 
 the protectorate of the Christian emperors was, that in their 
 codes they converted Church ordinances (that about baptism, 
 for instance) into statute laws. Thus Justinian, at the begin- 
 ning of the sixth century, ordered new-born infants to be 
 baptized, under a penalty for neglecting it: a law which still 
 passes for a Christian principle in the code of many a Christian 
 state. Evangelical and Apostolical freedom thus received its 
 death-blow from the same police crutch which was given it for 
 support. It has remained in the same crippled state to this day 
 in the East. 
 
 The hierarchical thirst for power in the bishops of tlic old 
 
144 INTERPRETATION AND APPLICATION. 
 
 capital of the West, favoured by the impressionable character 
 and sense of veneration of an aspiring nationality, that of the 
 German, formed the relation of the Church to the State in the 
 papal sense. The same veork was done in the Churches of the 
 East, among the Slavonic tribes, grouped around New Rome, 
 in the imperial sense. The Congregation disappeared here 
 also, under the form of an unorganized " People," which might 
 accept with favour the priestly election of the bishop, or 
 contest it with arms and in blood, in the interest of another 
 priestly candidate. The Presbyters, with the other clergy, 
 domineered over the congregation ; the Bishops over the priests ; 
 the Metropolitan over the bishops ; and lastly, the Pope over 
 them all directly, and besides, indirectly over the bishops through 
 the metropolitans, and over the congregations, i. e. the nations, 
 through the priests and monks. The Goths resisted ; the 
 Frankish Carlovingians leagued themselves with Rome, which, 
 at that same moment, introduced into Germany the complete 
 system of spiritual absolutism by means of Boniface, a West- 
 Saxon Englishman brought up at Rome, the founder of the 
 archbishopric of Mayence. Charlemagne, who had, it is true, a 
 tendency towards absolute government, but who was, neverthe- 
 less, a genuine German king, so correctly foresaw the result, 
 that towards the close of his life he expressed deep repentance 
 for having allowed the stolen crown of the Byzantine emperors 
 to be placed on his head at the altar of St. Peter's by a Roman 
 priest. Not less warranted was the grief of his Franks, that the 
 lying and despotic title of Emperor was substituted for the 
 national and constitutional Germanic title of King, in the sense 
 in which it still exists in England. The papal power naturally 
 prevailed over the imperial ; for it represented the spiritual and 
 human element in opposition to the military power and feudal 
 violence of the princes and nobles. 
 
 A real, complete nationality, like that of the ancient world, 
 could not be formed, for this very reason, that the highest moral 
 responsibility was wanting, the national decision on spiritual 
 matters, by which nations become of age. The conscience of 
 the German nation, then the predominant one, lay buried under 
 the altar on which the first so-called Roman emperor of the 
 
EXISTING CHURCH CONSTITUTIONS. 145 
 
 New Occident had received the Byzantine crown. Besides this, 
 the Byzantine law, which deifies ahsolutism, was introduced 
 from Italy: as well as papal supremacy, a well-merited punish- 
 ment for the injustice committed by the Germans towards the 
 free cities of Italy. After the vitality of the Germanic people 
 was thus crippled to a vast extent (and in Romanic Gaul, which, 
 by the Frank conquest, did not cease to be Celtic, all this took 
 place to a still greater degree), a national feeling sprang up for 
 the first time, on a small scale, in the free cities of Germany in 
 the thirteenth century. It was within them, and through them, 
 that the first spark of the internal as well as external life of the 
 future was kindled. 
 
 When, two centuries afterwards, the Reformation gave to 
 this element of life form and consistency, the nationality of 
 Church life which the Reformation called forth, yea postulated 
 and hallowed, established itself in opposition to the Clergy- 
 corporation, as a sovereign right, which is expressed by the 
 word " Supremacy." The Evangelical Prince took the place of 
 the people, who were not yet reorganized as a community. 
 This is the origin of the modern antagonisim of Church and 
 State, or State and Church. The supremacy, or the jus ma- 
 jestaticum circa sacra, is nothing but the dictatorial form of 
 defending the national liberty against clergy-corporation and 
 canon law ; with the dictatorship that antagonism ends, but 
 not necessarily all relation between the Church and Nation. 
 
 The rude and plunder-loving nobility joined the princely 
 despotism ; the jurist made a virtue of necessity, and a master 
 of the head of the Church. The Church was even plundered 
 and oppressed in many a republic, where, however, Presby- 
 terianism infused into the Church the germ of life by the 
 establishment of Synods, consisting of laymen and spiritual de- 
 legates, and superintendents (bishops), somewhat after the model 
 of the primitive Church. I have shown elsewhere by what 
 artifices this germ was kept under and confined, forced back, and 
 crippled. In the United States, where these means were not 
 used, the formula of "Separation of Church and State" was 
 established : a doctrine which is marked by a blind reaction 
 against the idea of a National Church, as identical with the old 
 VOL. II. L. 
 
146 INTERPRETATION AND APPLICATION. 
 
 State-Church. It was also in the United States that the purely 
 clerical Church of Episcopal England grew into a congregational 
 one, although its clerical doctrine and its exclusive Anglicanism 
 will never allow it to become, in this imperfect state, the ex- 
 pression of that gigantic new Anglo-Saxon nationality. 
 
 It must be always borne in mind, that in Europe, wherever 
 untrammelled by clerical or police restraint, the universal con- 
 science (commonly called public opinion) has pronounced this 
 verdict : " It is not well that the political government should 
 rule the Church ; but it is better than that the ecclesiastical 
 corporation, through the Church, should subjugate both govern- 
 ment and people." Some men of noble minds have a leaning 
 towards papacy, occasionally without being aware of or wishing 
 it, either because they are weary of police restraint, or because 
 they are unwilling to throw into the political scale the sacred 
 interests of the Church, and to embroil her guardians in the 
 party struggles of the day for power. But this marks only a 
 period of transition: as a system for the future it is a short- 
 sighted, insufficient, and destructive policy, to which the best 
 men among them will not long adhere. 
 
 If we hold up this general picture before the mirror of the 
 Apostolical Church, we shall see reflected this formula : The 
 government of the Church by sovereign protectors can only be 
 regarded as a dictatorship, and, consequently, as a mere tempo- 
 rary and transitory form. The true restoration must begin by 
 recognizing the congregation as the primitive vehicle of Church 
 life, commencing with the local, and ending with the national 
 congregation. In this manner the protectorial connexion, like 
 every other dictatorship, may pave the way to freedom and re- 
 newed vitality. In most cases, the dictator has it still in his 
 power to bring about such a happy consummation in a conser- 
 vative form. Its formula I believe to be in the followinsr 
 axioms : 
 
 Bishops and elders are essentially Rulers. Rulers must have 
 Power. Power must have Law. Law must have People. The 
 Church-People, to make laws, must have organized Congrega- 
 tions. Congregations must form Synods, which are representa- 
 tive congregations. Synods must represent organically the lay 
 
EXISTING CHURCH CONSTITUTIONS. 1-47 
 
 and the clergy elements. The clerical element is either a 
 parochial or an ecclesiastical one. The complete Synod, there- 
 fore, will in general have three orders : first, the Bishops or 
 superintendents, personally ; secondly, the deputies of the 
 parochial Clergy : and thirdly, the representatives of the Lay- 
 men, elected either by the communicants of the congregations, 
 or by the lay elders forming the Church-council or presbytery. 
 These last must have the right to demand the vote by order, and 
 thus exercise their legislative veto by themselves. Bishops 
 elected or nominated without the cooperation of the synod have 
 no natural ecclesiastical basis. 
 
 L 2 
 
148 INTERPRETATION AND APPLICATION. 
 
 III. 
 
 THE PRACTICAL APPLICATION. 
 
 The two bright points in the ancient Church, as regards its con- 
 stitution, are the Episcopate and the Congregational organiza- 
 tion. These two Institutions have an undying vitality ; the rest 
 is obsolete and inapplicable. 
 
 The Episcopate was originally the independent position of a 
 city clergyman, presiding over the congregation with the neigh- 
 bouring villages, having a body of Elders attached to him. 
 Where such a council can be formed, there is a complete Church, 
 a bishopric. The Elders are teachers and administrators. If 
 an individual happen to be engaged in either of these offices 
 more exclusively than the other, it makes no real alteration in 
 his position, for the Presbyters of the ancient Church filled both 
 situations. Their office was literally an office, not a rank. The 
 country clergymen were most probably members of the ecclesi- 
 astical council of the city Church : as the bishops of the country 
 towns certainly were members of the metropolitan presbytery. 
 
 Now, if we make a practical application of this idea to our 
 own circumstances, the restoration of the bishopric would give 
 us a district like a small English county ; that is to say, a 
 district including a town, which combines within it all the 
 elements requisite for the organization of a full congregation, 
 and especially, therefore, one which contains an educational 
 establishment or school. 
 
 As regards the formation of diocesan congregations (synods), 
 however, we must supply the defects of the Churches of the 
 third century, which produced such bitter fruits. We must 
 make them consist, not of bishops and other ecclesiastics merely, 
 but also of lay delegates from the single congregations. 
 
 It must depend upon the particular relations and circum- 
 stances of the case how far any steps can be taken towards 
 Provincial and National Synods. Uniformity is the most 
 
EPISCOPATE OF THE ANCIENT CHURCH. 149 
 
 dangerous foe of unity, because it gives the appearance of real 
 internal unity, and conceals the want of it ; while, on the other 
 hand, it elevates the external above the real. 
 
 As to National Church life, the aim must be, a union between 
 different Protestant communities, on the basis on which it has 
 been proposed in Prussia : a common Liturgy, with full liberty 
 as to its use in the parts connected with theological controversies 
 between Lutherans and Calvinists, and a common Synodical 
 constitution. This union has been carried into effect in the 
 greater part of Protestant Germany, since 1817, although in an 
 imperfect and not always quite correct manner, which very 
 naturally has produced the reaction of the last few years. But 
 the idea of such a union lives, as a cherished national and 
 Christian project, in the minds of an overwhelming majority 
 among the higher and middle classes. Arnold laboured to bring 
 about something of a similar kind in England. 
 
 The point of union in the extra-national or Catholic life of 
 the Church is based iipon the universality of the theological 
 and philosophical literature of the European world, as the 
 national ecclesiastical life is upon the organ of the intelligence 
 of the public mind, the national literature. But the first 
 condition requisite for bringing about a really living union of 
 the national Churches is, coojDeration for a common, elevating, 
 truly human, and Christian purpose. True Alliance is impos- 
 sible without such a practical purpose ; and free cooperation, 
 not union, is the watchword. 
 
 Such a purpose is furnished eminently by the Mission. 
 Through its means, a blessed cooperation of the English and 
 German Churches has been already effected. The obligation 
 that those who ai-e sent out by the Church Missionary Society 
 should receive English ordination, arises simply and solely from 
 the peculiar connexion between the English Church and State. 
 Although the Catholicizing portion of the clergy attaches to 
 ordination fanatical and superstitious notions, men of God, like 
 Schwartz, Gobat, and Krapff, the apostles of India, Abyssinia, 
 and Equatorial Africa, have felt that this should not prevent 
 them from combining with it a rational view. Nor should the 
 German missionaries, when they return home, feel any scruple 
 
 I. 3 
 
150 INTERPRETATION AND APPLICATION. 
 
 about being ordained in the German and Swedish sense, that 
 is, suffering themselves to be instituted to any given office with 
 blessing and prayer, where even the laws of the country meet 
 Episcopalian narrow-mindedness by an equally narrow Pres- 
 byterianism. 
 
 The whole idea of Ordination, in the sense of the High 
 Church party, is as foreign to the ancient Church as it is in- 
 compatible with Evangelical doctrine. 
 
 So the indelibility of the canonical character of the clergy, 
 although ascribed to pope Caius (283), is foreign to the ante- 
 Nicene period. It has been argued in France, in favour of not 
 allowing a right of civil marriage to priests seceding from the 
 Church, that without it very many clergymen would throw off 
 their gowns. A police regulation of this kind, however, seems 
 as unworthy of a Church of the Gospel, and of a free Germanic 
 land, as the restoration of the restraints of the walls of a cloister. 
 So it has even been felt in Belgium, where the priest does not 
 lose his rights as a citizen, if he resign his clerical office. 
 
 Thus much upon the applicability of the Episcopate, as one 
 of the two vital institutions of the ancient Church. Those 
 Churches who have it ought to reform it, if they will boast of 
 Apostolicity : those who have it not would do well to restore 
 it, in order to find in it a means for creating and maintaining a 
 self-governing national Church. It is an historical fact that the 
 Episcopate has done more than any other institution to main- 
 tain in England the independence of the Church from the des- 
 potism of princes, ministers, and parliaments ; and it is another 
 fact that, with the exception of two small Presbyterian re- 
 publics (Scotland and Holland), and the National Scotch 
 Church — all three Calvinistic, — no continental Church ever 
 has obtained a free and a national existence except the Episcopal 
 one of Sweden. A Government with titular Bishops having no 
 power, and acting under the supreme control and guidance of 
 the Minister of the Interior, or Police, or of Worship, is worse 
 than an undisguised bureaucratic Church : no title, no liturgy 
 even, can supply the want of the first condition of life and au_ 
 thority, an independent, self-governing corporate body, whether 
 it be called Fiscal, Consistorial, or simply Government, 
 
EPISCOPATE OF THE ANCIENT CHURCH. 151 
 
 As to the second point, the organization of the local Con- 
 gregational life of the people, the Episcopal Church of England 
 has scarcely a trace of it, the congregation, as such, possessing 
 no ecclesiastical rights, and having no canonical redress against 
 their clergyman and bishop, nor any control over their own 
 congregational affairs beyond the pecuniary check exercised in 
 some trifling matters by the vestry. At this point Church 
 reform must begin. Any such reform is impossible, without 
 the organization of the congregational life, the right of a limited 
 veto, and a system of election for being represented in diocesan 
 synods. The theoretical controversy, whether the revival of 
 the synodical life of the Church ought to emanate, in the first 
 place, from the Convocation, or from a Royal Commission, can, 
 practically, only be settled in the second or national, not in the 
 clerical, sense. All the historical precedents are besides in its 
 favour. But parliamentary interference ought only to come in 
 at the last stage, when a new charter of the Church is to be 
 legally acknowledged and confirmed : for the fiction of the 
 Parliament being, as it were, the lay branch of the Convocation, 
 is entirely destroyed by the late political reforms. The right 
 of free assent cannot be denied to the clergy : but it does not 
 seem to follow, that they must exercise it in the form of Con- 
 vocation, which itself has usurped the place of the Synod. 
 
 The Episcopal Church of Sweden has done more for the 
 congregation ; and her further reform is, comparatively speaking, 
 easy, because she has abolished the binding power of the Romish 
 canon law, without the repeal of which no national Church can 
 move a single step in the way of reconstructive reform. 
 
 The Reformed Churches of Holland and Germany have only 
 to preserve, purify, and complete the synodic element, in order 
 to come up to the constitutional model of primitive Christianity ; 
 it being well understood, that the principle must be preserved 
 of considering those only as members who live in communion 
 with the Church. But it is a folly to expect anything from 
 any form of Church government which is not emancipated from 
 police control. In this sphere little has been done in Germany 
 except in provincial Reformed or United Churches. However, 
 the new element of free Christian association, coupled with a re- 
 
 h 4 
 
152 INTERPRETATION AND APPLICATION. 
 
 stored diaconate in the ancient sense, is the vocation of the day, 
 and this element comes from Protestant Germany. The Dea- 
 conesses of Kaiserswerth, who serve its hospitals, educate the 
 orphans, and reform the fallen, and the Associations of the Inner 
 Mission of Wichern, which are more and more covering Pro- 
 testant Germany with a network of practical charity and brother- 
 hood, are the living evidences of the Spirit of God in the German 
 Church, enabling her to sing, in all humility, in spite of all her 
 revilers, and in the midst of deep affliction, her old hymn : 
 
 " Er ist mit uns wohl auf dem Plan 
 Mit seinem Geist und Gaben ! " 
 
BOOK III. 
 
 THE CHRISTIAN SACRIFICE, AND THE CHURCH LITURGY 
 OR ORDER OF DIVINE SERVICE. 
 
 I. 
 
 THE PICTUKE. 
 
 After what I have said in the Second Book, and in other works, 
 it only remains, in this place, to consider the Liturgy, and that 
 of the Ci?'^inunion Service in particular, from the point of view 
 of Universal History, in order to elucidate the idea of the 
 Christian sacrifice, and to point out the grand epochs in its de- 
 velopment. These considerations will therefore be the key to 
 the complete view of the epochs of the Sacramental Liturgies of 
 the ancient Church which we exhibit in the Third Volume of the 
 Analecta, based upon all that exists of genuine documents. 
 
 The original liturgical arrangements of the earliest Church 
 appear very scanty, if we look in them for forms of prayer. 
 Their almost exclusive object was to give the usual order of the 
 service, and especially the order of the acts which constituted, 
 according to the custom of the second century, the celebration 
 of the Lord's Supper. The commencement of each of these acts 
 was, as a general rule, marked or introduced by the primitive 
 symbolic forms of mutual salutation and benediction on the part 
 of the clergy and congregation, or by the responsive recitation 
 of a verse of the Psalms. What is thus solemnly announced is 
 an organic part of the service : and the fundamental idea of the 
 whole worship is, that it is a common act of the people, com- 
 mencing by teaching and singing, and concluding with prayer and 
 
154 INTEKPllETATION AND APPLICATION. 
 
 blessing. Now this act is an external one, in the ordinary sense 
 of the word ; and in that sense there are only two great acts in 
 the service, the Oblation and the Communion. The Oblation is 
 the offering of contributions to the Lord's Supper, either for the 
 love-feast, or for the clergy and poorer part of the congregation, 
 and includes the placing on the communion-table of the bread 
 and wine. The Communion is the Supper of the people, the 
 Kiss of Peace the solemn preparation either for the Oblation or 
 for the Communion. But there are also spiritual acts. Such 
 are Prayer, whether petition or thanksgiving ; such is, in an 
 eminent sense, the Sacrificial Prayer, the expression of the act 
 of internal self-sacrifice, of which the consecration of the elements 
 is only the introduction. Thus the whole service was the 
 spiritual act of the worshipping congregation. The external 
 act was combined with praying : it was sacred only so far as it 
 was symbolical of some inner act, more clearly expressed by 
 prayer. The external posture (standing up, bending, or kneel- 
 ing) which accompanied the word had likewise such a symbolical 
 meaning. But whether a sacred word, or solemn position, all 
 was equally meant to represent what took place internally, and 
 had no essential value except as thus being a sign of that real 
 internal act of the mind. The congregational service, therefore, 
 was principally worship, and the sacrifice the culminating point of 
 the act. But the preparatory teaching, also, like the prepara- 
 tory confession of sins and the prayers, took the form of acts, 
 inasmuch as the congregation expressed their participation in 
 the reading of Scripture and in the sermon, as well as in that 
 confession and in these prayers, by the responsive act of saying 
 or singing Amen! Hallelujah! or a responsive sentence or hymn. 
 The sermon itself, however, was, like every prayer except the 
 Lord's Prayer, and the words of the Invocation of the Spirit, an 
 extemporization : it was a high spiritual act, a living manifest- 
 ation of that Spirit of God which was promised and given to the 
 congregation of believers. 
 
 According to the ancient Church there is no Christian worship 
 except where the people perform such an inward act, and, there- 
 fore, in the higher sense, no worship without sacrifice. Now, 
 the order, sequence, and import of the individual portions of 
 
THE SUNDAY SERVICE. 155 
 
 these sacred acts, the aim and scope of the Church Prayer 
 uttered, are usually enumerated or intimated in this our general 
 frame. The prayers which we read in the present Greek text 
 of the " Apostolic Constitutions " bear self-evident proofs of a 
 later date, by the very circumstance of their not being found in 
 the earlier and purer texts, and by their being very unskilfully 
 inserted. Even the most ancient liturgical formulary, namely, 
 that which is inserted into the Abyssinian text of the " Apo- 
 stolical Constitutions " of the Coptic Church, is not found in the 
 original text of the Coptic Collection. Still, as my " Reliquiae 
 LiturgicJE " in the Analecta proves, there existed in the time 
 of Hippolytus complete formularies of the real Communion Ser- 
 vice, which were themselves already an amplification of a shorter 
 formulary of the second century. But for these details we must 
 refer our readers to the Reliquiae Liturgicse ; for they cannot be 
 understood except by a comparison with the later forms. The free 
 use made of the Liturgies of our age shows that they were not 
 rigorously prescribed formularies, and that they left much for 
 free prayer and for selection. This applies in particular to the 
 principal prayer, used at the eucharistic Thanksgiving, before 
 the Lord's Supper, the prayer of consecration. This prayer, in 
 its original shape, is a supplication that God will send down His 
 Holy Spirit on the congregation, and sanctify their hearts : in 
 the liturgical formularies the Spirit is called down on the con- 
 gregation and on their offerings, in order that the latter may 
 become to the communicants the Lord's Body and Blood. There 
 was originally only one prescribed prayer here, namely, the 
 Lord's Prayer ; which, for this purpose, was amplified and ex- 
 tended liturgically, so as to include, implicitly or explicitly, that 
 Invocation of the Holy Spirit. 
 
 The Sunday service consisted of two parts. The first com- 
 menced with singing of psalms out of the psalm-book, or of new 
 psalms and hymns in the Greek or Roman metre. It concluded 
 with the homily or sermon, that is to say, with the expounding 
 of the portion of Scripture which had been read, coupled with 
 a practical application and exhortation. The Catechumens, 
 who had begun their course of instruction, were present at this 
 part of the service. Strangers, likewise, might be present as 
 
156 INTERPRETATION AND APPLICATION. 
 
 guests, or to satisfy their curiosity. The Catechumens were 
 dismissed with a prayer and blessing before the Lord's Supper 
 was celebrated. According to the Alexandrian Constitutions 
 this prayer and blessing might be delivered by a layman ; a 
 relic of the most ancient Apostolical freedom of teaching and 
 praying in the congregation. All strangers were then enjoined 
 to withdraw from the worship of the Believers. The Believers 
 hereupon expressed generally their brotherhood by saluting 
 each other with the kiss of peace : the men the men, and the 
 women the women. This was done in imitation of the custom 
 established, as it appears, by Christ among His disciples. The 
 solemnity was devised to hallow the desecrated human body, 
 and restore the desecrated temple of God : it was maintained 
 in the midst of a corrupt and sneering world, with that courage 
 which faith alone inspires. 
 
 This service, likewise, of the Believers had its own Church- 
 singing, and vi^e may venture to consider as one of the earliest 
 of them the Morning Hymn, the most \'*^ ble of all, to 
 which Pliny the Younger unmistakably alludes, and the older 
 form of which we think we have restored. The Christians 
 used, besides, several other morning and evening hymns. 
 Spiritual odes, private hymns, especially for morning and even- 
 ing devotion, likewise enlivened domestic life. We give an 
 evening hymn of primitive Greek origin, which is akin to the 
 old Hellenic salutation of light when the evening lamp was 
 lighted. Learned private compositions, like the one with 
 which the " Pedagogue " of Clemens of Alexandria concludes, 
 do not belong to this class. They were never used by the 
 congregations, and, indeed, were as little adapted as they were 
 intended for that purpose. Every thing really old and genuine 
 which belongs here is given fully in our Text-Book, the Notes 
 to which furnish all requisite information. 
 
 The first of the two principal acts in the celebration of the 
 Lord's Supper was the offering of gifts on the part of the 
 members of the Church, and the placing of them on the com- 
 munion-table, or under and by the side of it, by the clergy, the 
 elders of the congregation, and their assistants. Now this 
 offering, and the thanks for the offered gifts in a prayer of 
 
THE SERVICE OF THE BELIEVERS. 157 
 
 blessing, called by Irenaeus the sacrificial act of Christian piety, 
 are, as is shown in detail in the Second Part, an Apostolic 
 institution. It is impossible to doubt the truth of such a 
 statement, if we read our Text-Book, and consider the general 
 custom of the ancient Christian congregations. The material 
 misunderstanding of this so simply venerable and deeply 
 significant act, and the mystico-magical superstition which has 
 gradually been engrafted upon it, are fully explained, as can 
 now be authentically proved, by the entire perversion of the 
 original notions of Sacrifice, Church, and Priesthood. But 
 this explanation implies the admission of that custom being a 
 primitive one, and instituted by the Apostles. 
 
 When the Sunday observance was extended beyond the 
 apartments of individual believing families, and special rooms 
 for prayer were appointed, the picture of this act of Oblation can 
 be represented in its fullest details. The members of the 
 Church who had any thing to give (frequently the minority, 
 therefore), no*- ' s took upon themselves the chai'ge of the 
 bread and wine lor the Lord's Supper, but likewise brought 
 with them the first-fruits of corn, wine, and oil, and other gifts 
 of the season. With this Oblation the Service of the Believers 
 originally began. When all those who were not members of 
 the congregation had withdrawn, the persons offering and other 
 communicants drew near the altar. The elders and their 
 assistants received every thing, and arranged the gifts in order, 
 placing them on or round the table of the Holy Supper, the 
 visible centre of the great act. 
 
 Thus when, with a wonderful instinct, the oblong basilica- 
 form, with the apse at the end, was established as the generally 
 prevailing type for the Hall of Prayer (and the first adulterated 
 Greek Collection so gives it), the clergy took their places in 
 that circular building, the old tribunal, on both sides of the 
 bishop's chair ; the congregation stood in the nave and the side 
 aisles, if the building contained such, the men and women apart. 
 The table, which the inward sacrifice of believers, as brothers 
 in Christ, made the altar of mankind, stood in the only natural 
 place for it, between the clergy and congregation. Thus its 
 position was very soon fixed in the intersection of the transepts 
 
"158 INTERPRETATION AND APPLICATION. 
 
 and the nave, or the entrance of the chancel. When the 
 Service of the Believers was about to begin, the clergy 
 approached the altar from one side, the congregation from the 
 other. The bishop, or officiating elder, stood behind or by the 
 side of the altar, looking towards the congregation. The 
 direction of the Church was usually, but without any super- 
 stitious law upon the subject, from east to west : in the Eastern 
 Church the apse formed the east side ; in Rome the opposite 
 direction seems to have originally prevailed. I have shown all 
 this in detail in my work on the Roman Basilicas, and in the 
 plates belonging to it. 
 
 The congregation had now " built itself up ; " that is to say, 
 the feeling of their mutual community with God through Christ, 
 as the Eternal High Priest, had become strong in their souls. 
 In this tone of mind, with this consciousness, they advanced to 
 the great act, the object of the ceremony. This act, as cannot 
 be too often repeated, was the thankful sacrifice of Self, a vow 
 which was to be pledged here, to be sealed in the Lord's 
 Supper, and realized by continual struggle in life for the 
 promotion of the kingdom of God. What appeared externally 
 was the offering of the bread and wine : the internal action was 
 the act of sacrifice on the part of the Church in gratitude for 
 the mercies and blessings of God, with especial thankful re- 
 membrance of the sacrificial death of Jesus for mankind. This 
 internal act was from the very first expressed in words, not 
 simply in symbolical signs. The Spirit found its own sign, the 
 Word. This word was of a twofold character, the one fixed, 
 the other free. The liturgically amplified and adapted Lord's 
 Prayer was the fixed symbolical element : the free prayer con- 
 sisted in a form of praise of God, the Creator, the Sustainer, 
 and Saviour, a form transferred from the thanksgiving offered 
 by every head of a Jewish family before meat. The Invocation 
 of the Spirit was expressed either by the Lord's Prayer, or in 
 the prayer of Thanksgiving. Our records state that it was left 
 to every bishop and elder to express the outpouring of the 
 thankful heart, uttered in the soul of the congregation, before 
 the Feast of Love, in words suggested by the Spirit at the 
 
THE PRAYER OF CONSECRATION. 159 
 
 moment. This point is so firmly established, that it is un- 
 necessary for me to add any thing on the subject. 
 
 But it is important to prove three things, which have 
 hitherto been by no means fully acknowledged, and still less 
 demonstrated. First, that our present complete form of the 
 Lord's Prayer has grown out of its being used in this act for the 
 purpose of calling down a blessing upon the thanksgiving con- 
 gregation. Secondly, that in this liturgically amplified Lord's 
 Pi'ayer, the germ of the ecclesiastical prayer of Consecration was 
 already developed at the end of the first century. Thirdly, 
 that the established prayers of Consecration, in the fourth and 
 fifth centuries, and the whole set of the prayers of Oblation, or 
 the prayers preceding the administration of the Supper, sprang 
 from the union of the ecclesiastical Lord's Prayer and the 
 originally free prayer of the Jewish thanksgiving: to which 
 prayers the words of Listitution, cited historically, were joined. 
 
 A series of testimony, reaching down to Gregory the Great, 
 proves that the entire act of prayer was originally frequently 
 represented by the Lord's Pi-ayer alone, but was never per- 
 formed without it. Now, in this ancient custom, and in no 
 other cause, originated our concluding doxology in the Lord's 
 Prayer, as well as the " Amen ; " that is to say, the two 
 additions which appear in uncritical editions of the New 
 Testament, as well as in the ecclesiastical translations, as a 
 portion of the text of St. Matthew's Gospel (vi. 13. ; compare 
 Luke, xi. 4.). The consecrating prayer before the Lord's 
 Supper, from which all our Church prayers have been made, 
 had, as intimated above, a double historical basis. One was the 
 prayer such as the head of a Jewish family uttered before 
 eating, and before the distribution of the wine, and such as 
 Christ at the Last Supper uttered, " blessing ; " that is to say, 
 the giving of thanks, with especial reference to His own 
 sacrificial death. The account of this event (the Institution of 
 the Supper, as it is called) might at the Church ceremony be 
 presumed to be known, or might be recited on account of its 
 universal importance. The prayer which the Lord Himself 
 uttered at the Last Supper was nowhere recorded, nor was it 
 destined to be used on any other occasion. The president of 
 
160 INTERPRETATION AND APPLICATION. 
 
 the assembled Christian community spoke as the Spirit gave 
 him utterance, but, from all the indications which we find, this 
 thanksgiving, arising from the Jewish thanksgiving for the gifts 
 of bread and wine, became a general thanksgiving for all the 
 other blessings bestowed by God. Such, then, was the basis of 
 that prayer which had reference to the gifts, to their offering, 
 and to the partaking of the same. 
 
 The other basis, the Lord's Prayer, was unconnected with 
 the Supper, or anything external; it was a general supplication. 
 To it the especial prayer for the occasion, that the Holy Ghost 
 might be poured down on the congregation preparing for the 
 sacrifice, may have been joined. Finally, any such prayer must 
 have concluded with the praise of God. 
 
 Both elements must have been in various ways combined. 
 The supplication for the outpouring of the Spirit on the con- 
 gregation might be united with the thanks for the bread and 
 wine set before them : the praise of God with thankfulness for 
 His gifts. The sacrifice of the worshipping believers, the cul- 
 minating point of the internal act, was symbolically intimated 
 by the offering and consecration of the gifts, sealed and sub- 
 stantiated by the grateful partaking in remembrance of Christ 
 and of His sacrificial death. When the Spirit of the con- 
 gregation sought for words to express this act of sacrifice, it 
 might find them in the Lord's Prayer or in a free prayer, or in 
 both. 
 
 Let us first of all examine the relation between the Lord's 
 Prayer and the three parts of the act of prayer, from the 
 offering to the distribution of the elements : first, the sup- 
 plication ; secondly, the praise and thanksgiving ; or, in theo- 
 logical terms, the precatory, the eucharistic, and the sacrificial 
 prayers. To these were to be added, finally, the utterance, by 
 the congregation, of their concordance with the vows of their 
 minister, if he said the prayer ; or by the minister, of his 
 participation in those of the people, if (as in the Greek Church) 
 they said the Lord's Prayer. The three parts of the liturgically 
 extended Lord's Prayer are in exact correspondence with these 
 three acts : the petitions, with the supplication ; the doxology, 
 with the praise and thanksgiving ; the Amen, with the general 
 
THE lord's prayer. IGl 
 
 concordance. Now those petitions were originally only six : 
 the seventh is nothing but the response of the worshipping 
 congregation to what precedes. This will explain the fact that 
 the one half of the ancient tradition omits this seventh petition 
 in the text of the Gospel of St. Luke : if it had originally 
 formed a part of the text, it would never have been left out in 
 a MS. Secondly, we have here the explanation of a custom 
 prevalent in many ancient Churches, of the minister repeating 
 the Lord's Prayer as far as the words, *' And lead us not into 
 temptation;" and of the people answering, "But deliver us 
 from evil : " or vice versa. In some Liturgies the response 
 begins even with the fifth petition, *' Lead us not into tempta- 
 tion ; " but all our manuscripts of the Gospel attribute these 
 words to Christ himself. Thus much as to the Scriptural text 
 of the petition having been amplified by the Primitive Com- 
 munion Service. But it is a fact capable of direct proof, that 
 the second of the six original petitions was modified for this 
 purpose. It is only by the liturgical use of the Lord's Prayer 
 at this place that we can explain the otherwise utterly un- 
 intelligible origin of the reading to which Tertullian alludes as 
 that of the Marcionites, and which Gregory of Nyssa and 
 Maximus give and notice as an ancient authentic reading ; 
 namely, instead of the supplication : " Thy kingdom come," 
 these words : " The Holy Ghost descend upon us and purify 
 us." 
 
 As a various reading of the model prayer given by Christ to 
 the Apostles, this is absolute nonsense ; as the germ of the 
 development of the prayer of consecration from the Lord's 
 Prayer, it is invaluable. For it contains the fundamental 
 thought of the more extended Church prayer of consecration, 
 to which Ircnaeus already alludes : the supplication that the 
 Holy Spirit may descend upon us and sanctify our hearts. 
 This is the original idea : the invocation of the blessing of the 
 Spirit upon the bread and wine which we are about to partake 
 of as the body of our Lord is an amplification. 
 
 The fundamental idea of all Christian worship, the thankful 
 self-sacrifice, was never so fuHy expressed by the ancient 
 Church as would have been desirable when the liturgical for- 
 
 VOL. ir. M 
 
162 INTERPRETATION AND APPLICATION. 
 
 mularies became fixed. It was a fatal circumstance, that the 
 service of adoration, or self-sacrifice, was not separated from the 
 celebration of the Lord's Supper at the time when the Com- 
 munion of the whole congregation ceased, or before that period. 
 The substitution of a mock oblation for the real oblation of the 
 people, was another step in the wrong direction. On this point, 
 the principles have been established in the Essays : the Liturgies 
 in the Analecta exhibit the details. 
 
 Two facts, however, must be pointed out here, on account of 
 subsequent misunderstandings, of which we shall have to speak 
 presently. The Communion was always preceded by a prayer 
 of consecration, either the Lord's Prayer or a special prayer of 
 Livocation, or both. Now, as the self-offering was nothing but 
 the highest point of the consecration prayer, it always took 
 place before the Communion ; it never followed it. The Com- 
 munion was the sealing of the sacrifice, of the vow of the 
 believer, but it was not a sacrifice itself, nor was the real 
 sacrifice merely an expression of thanks for the Communion : 
 on the contrary, it was, and is, independent of the Communion. 
 That during the sixth century the Roman Church said it after 
 the Communion, if at all, is a curious circumstance, which can 
 nly be accounted for by a misunderstanding of the ancient 
 custom of not writing down those words in the formularies for 
 the Communion, any more than the free prayer of thanksgiving-. 
 
 Having established this point as the first liturgical germ of 
 the Communion Service, we can now, with greater distinctness, 
 trace a picture according to the different epochs of the Com- 
 munion Service, 
 
 The expression, by liturgical formularies, of the new internal 
 life of mankind in God commenced with the Lord's Prayer and 
 free thanksgiving in the first age of the Apostles. When the 
 worshipping congregation became conscious of having a place in 
 the world's history, which was the case after the first, and still 
 more after the second and final, destruction of Jerusalem by 
 Hadrian, the spirit sought for more definite expressions of that 
 inward life and act. At the same time, also, the solemnity 
 itself, and the symbolical signification of the act of offering and of 
 the thing offered, became more significant. The third century 
 
THE COMMUNION SERVICE. 163 
 
 had a more developed Liturgy than the second ; hut the free 
 prayer seems to have still had a place by the side of the for- 
 mulary. A solemn set of words for the Invocation of the Spirit 
 upon the people, or upon the people and their oblations, was, 
 as it appears, always used in every Church, from the early part 
 of the second century. But the Coptic Constitutions prove 
 that the congregation had jealously insisted that every minister 
 should on the whole deliver his prayer of thanksgiving as the 
 Spirit gave him utterance, with this condition, that he must 
 address it to the only true God and Creator, the Father of the 
 Son, and Sender of the Spirit, and not to a God of the philo- 
 sophical schools ; in short, as an orthodox Christian. 
 
 The Spirit of God alone, therefore, knows in what terms the 
 Church expressed her sacrifice when she entered upon her 
 second century, after the last Apostle had gone to his rest, 
 which, on the whole, corresponds with the period when the 
 celebration of the Lord's Supper was entirely separated from 
 the meal, and became part of the early Morning Service. Justin 
 Martyr says, in good Greek (which, I am sorry to say, even 
 Bingham has misinterpreted), that the officiating elder uttered 
 his thanksgiving as well as he could, that is to say, as far as the 
 Spirit enabled him to do justice to the grand object, the 
 Christian thanksgiving. The form of words inspired by the 
 Spirit must have been various, and if the Spirit did not supply 
 the offerer with such forms, the Lord's Prayer, as amplified in 
 the Liturgy, must have been substituted, and silent prayer 
 used instead of words. We know, however, if we know 
 anything at all, that, as late as the fourth and fifth (yea, the 
 sixth and seventh) centuries, the Communion Service was still 
 considered merely as an act of thanksgiving of the congregation 
 for their redemption, and not at all as a repetition of the 
 sacrifice of atonement. Nothing was further from the thou"-hts 
 of the Fathers of the fourth and fifth centuries than the notion 
 of a magical operation of the Spirit on the material elements, 
 the bread and wine. 
 
 And here is the inmost centre, the true mystery of the 
 Christian worship. 
 
 The Communion itself, the second of these two outwardly 
 
 M 2 
 
164 INTERPRETATION AND APPLICATION. 
 
 visible acts, had grown into the symboHcal meal of worship, as 
 an early morning, or at least ante-prandial, solemnity ; whereas 
 the proper meal, as a feast of brotherhood and love (agape), 
 was celebrated at their evening meeting, partly in the Hall of 
 Prayer itself, partly in private houses. This meal was, and 
 remained, essentially a congregational meal, to which every 
 person who had any thing to bring offered his contribution. 
 
 Thus worship continued to be the main feature in the Service 
 of the Believers, as instruction was the preparatory service, in 
 which the Catechumens also took part. In both the congre- 
 gation *' built itself up " as the Temj)le of God : as an outward 
 temple is necessarily constructed of single blocks, so is the 
 congregation built up of single souls. This deep symbol, which 
 pervades all the languages of Christian nations, is based upon 
 expressions and exhortations of the Apostles, and springs from 
 the deejjest feeling of the peculiarity of Christian worship. 
 There is no trace of it either in Judaism or Paganism. 
 
 The Supplication Prayer might be used in all parts of the 
 service, and in the most ancient instances of its occurrence 
 was sometimes used before, sometimes after, the consecration. 
 Thanksgiving was mixed up with it, and thanksgiving was the 
 conclusion of the celebration of Lord's Supper. 
 
 There is no doubt that the commemoration of the departed 
 brethren had also in very early times a precatory clause, 
 expressing a wish for their perfect happiness. But the pro- 
 minent feature is that of thanksgiving and joy. This alone is 
 expressed in the records of our age. Origen says : ** It seem 
 proper to thank the Saints in the solemn prayers of the Church, 
 for this reason also, that we are benefited by the remembrance 
 of them." "We find, likewise, in a very ancient commentary on 
 the Book of Job, attributed to him : " We cherish the pious 
 remembrance of the Saints and of our relatives and friends who 
 have departed in faith, as well from joy for their deliverance, as 
 in order to pray that we too may have a blessed end." All this 
 is mentioned and fully discussed in Bingham, in the passage 
 quoted above. 
 
 But what we wish to impress here upon tlie Christian 
 inquirer is, that nothing of all this is found in the most ancient 
 
THE COMMUNION SERVICE. 165 
 
 formularies ; and that not only the place and the expression 
 were left free, but that none of these points formed part of the 
 celebration of the Lord's Supper in the second century. 
 
 As to the details of this liturgical picture, we refer to the 
 Introduction to the liturgies of the second, third, and fourth 
 centuries prefixed to the Third Volume of the Analecta. 
 
 TSl 3 
 
166 INTERPRETATION AND APPLICATION. 
 
 II. 
 
 THE KEFLEX. 
 
 1. The Reflex of the Worship of the Eastern Church in the 
 Mirror of the Apostolical Age. 
 
 We are now about to exhibit the contrast and the analogy 
 between the service of the Communion in the Apostolical age, 
 and in the post-Nicene period. 
 
 The process of development which we have traced, respecting 
 the consecration before prayer and the Christian sacrifice, is 
 surprisingly confirmed by the very words in the extensive 
 prayers of the Greek Church, as they became established and 
 hallowed forms in the third and fourth centuries. The formu- 
 laries of the second century were variously extended and 
 amplified, and appear as fixed in the fourth century. We 
 possess in Chrysostom's Homilies on the Liturgy of his Church 
 authentic testimony in favour of their having had, towards the 
 end of this century, in the principal Churches, substantially 
 (although not identically) the same form which we find in the 
 post-Nicene Alexandrian Liturgy, and in the oldest texts of the 
 Constantinopolitan Liturgy, bearing the names of Basil and 
 Chrysostom. It can be proved that these Fathers were not its 
 authors ; it contains both later and earlier elements. Chry- 
 sostom treats the formularies of his age already as the word of 
 the Church, as traditional. We exhibit in the Analecta 
 a Liturgy which belongs to the second century, and forms the 
 connecting link between those formularies of the fourth century 
 and the short formulas of the Churches of the Apostolic age, 
 mixed up with free prayer, of which our Text- Book is intended 
 to give the frame work. The early Liturgies were not literary 
 productions, but the prayers of godly men which sprang from 
 Church life, and which had been used with favour and blessing. 
 As the consciousness of the Church in regard to her sacrifice 
 was obscured, people adhered more and more closely to the 
 
WORSHIP OF THE EASTERN CHURCH. 167 
 
 formulas which the great lights of the early ages, such as the 
 two Fathers alluded to above, had used and perhaps here and 
 there retouched. When the idea dies, formularies grow, like 
 mushrooms, out of its grave. 
 
 Now, in all authentic Church formularies of prayers of conse- 
 cration before the Communion, the words of that liturgical 
 voice of the first century are echoed throughout: "May the 
 Holy Ghost descend upon us, and purify us ! " 
 
 The genuine words of consecration used in the fourth and 
 fifth centuries at the celebration of the Lord's Supper contain, 
 beyond all doubt, the development of the petition originally in- 
 serted into the Lord's Prayer itself concerning the sending down 
 of the Spirit for the sanctifying of the people. The development 
 of the second petition was thus, in the first century, the utterance 
 of that Christian and Apostolic idea. The fuller development 
 of the thanksgiving and self-consecration took place in the free 
 prayer, properly called the Prayer of Consecration. In this 
 prayer a certain solemn phraseology or mode of expression for 
 invoking the Spirit was considered as sanctioned by the usage 
 of the Church : the rest was free as to expression and extent, 
 but fixed as to object and general tenour. The words of the 
 Institution may or may not have been added to that prayer. 
 Then followed fixed written formularies ; but in all of them the 
 consecration means a prayer, to which the recital of those words 
 forms the historical introduction. It was nothing but pure 
 misunderstanding in the dark ages of barbarism, to see in conse- 
 cration, not the consecrating prayers, but the historical quota- 
 tion of the words of Institution. But it is not a less barbarous 
 mistake, to suppose that the sacrifice of the ancient Church was 
 that of the elements, whether before or after the words of con- 
 secration. The Evangelical and Apostolical idea of the true 
 sacrifice was, for reasons amply explained, already obscured, 
 when the liturgical formularies became fixed. Still, in spite of 
 the accumulation of the expressions, and in spite of the oblation 
 prayers and those which immediately precede and follow the 
 Communion being full of repetitions, the spiritual act of thank- 
 ful self-sacrifice pervades all the Liturgies of the Eastern Church 
 in the fourth and fifth centuries. It is this act, this vow, which 
 
 M 4 
 
1G8 INTEEPnETATION AND APrLICATION. 
 
 is symbolized by the OiFering, sealed by the Communion, and 
 sanctified by the Remembrance of the sacrificial death of Christ. 
 The Liturgy named after Chrysostom expresses the prayer ex- 
 plicitly as a vow. 
 
 The Supplication Prayer was also strictly an intercessory 
 prayer for all members of the Church, both for the brethren 
 who had fallen asleep, and for the Apostles and the mother of 
 our Lord. The saying of Augustin (cited by Innocent IIL as 
 Scriptural), " It offends the Martyr if any one prays for the 
 Martyr," is one of the bold paradoxes of the great African, 
 which have led to innovations, and become turning points in the 
 internal history of the Church. The ancient Christians had not 
 a clear conception of the real meaning of the very indefinite 
 word " for," the general sense of which in the earliest Liturgies 
 is partly "in the name of," partly "with reference to." But 
 the thanksgiving for the deliverance of the deceased, as the new 
 Christian element, is still the prominent feature, when mention 
 is made of those who have departed in peace (/?i pace). Inde- 
 pendently of the Jewish custom, it was indeed very natural that 
 the expression of hope in the eternal happiness of departed be- 
 lievers, and of the feeling of "the Communion of Saints" beyond 
 the limits of space and time, should be conjoined with this 
 prayer ; for, according to the views of the ancient Church, the 
 souls of the departed had also a longing for the accomplishment 
 of the number of the elect, and the complete triumph of the 
 kingdom of God. 
 
 The connexion of this thanksgiving and this prayer in which 
 mention was made of the departed with the celebration of the 
 Eucharist, in the fourth and fifth centuries, was owing to the 
 belief in the efficacy of the intercessory prayer of the Church, 
 more especially when the believers celebrated the Holy Supper, 
 This is stated by Cyril and Epiphanius. In the time of Pru- 
 dentius, the cotemporary of the latter, the celebration of the 
 Eucharist on the anniversary of the martyrdom of Hippolytus 
 was regarded as a thanksgiving and bond of love, a strengthening 
 of faith by looking up to those who had already finished their 
 course. The idea of intercession for the souls of the departed, 
 who were supposed to pass through a purifying fire, was first 
 
COMMUNION SERVICE OF THE GAULS. 169 
 
 introduced by and after Augustin, and, in fact, in the Western 
 Church. 
 
 II. The Reflex of the Communion Service of the Gauls of 
 Spain, of Blilan, and of Africa. 
 
 The Eastern Liturgies thus still preserve, on the whole, the 
 character of a Sacrifice of Thanksgiving in the minds of the con- 
 gregation ; and the decay of the age in which they became fixed 
 shows itself more in the overgrowth of the ceremonial element, 
 than in the corruption and change of that fundamental cha- 
 racter. 
 
 That this was also the case, at least to a certain degree, in 
 the ancient fixed Liturgies of the Gauls of Spain, of Africa, and 
 even of Milan, is proved by the scanty genuine remains of their 
 Sacramental Service. Our collection of Liturgies exhibits all 
 these remains. They present, in the order of the Sacramental 
 Prayers, the Greek type : particularly the Galilean and Moz- 
 arabic (of the Goths in Spain), which have the same origin, and 
 in which, whatever is common to both may be safely considered, 
 and in most cases can be proved to be, genuine. But the work 
 of denationalizing the Churches of the West, particularly after 
 Gregory the Great (who himself expresses more generous ideas 
 in his truly Apostolic letter to Augustine, archbishop of Canter- 
 bury), began with the destruction of the canon, and the substitu- 
 tion of that of the Roman Church. This work of destruction 
 has been most complete in the canon of the ritual of Milan 
 which, although called Ambrosian, is essentially that of the 
 canon of Gregory. I believe I have shown that a great part of 
 the ancient national consecration prayers still exist. But at all 
 events we may say, that in the Liturgies of these Churches the 
 cliaracter of Thanksgiving predominates : the precatory part is 
 subordinate, the propitiatory idea of the rite excluded. 
 
170 INTERPRETATION AND APPLICATION. 
 
 III. The Reflex of the Communion Service of the Church of 
 
 Rome. 
 
 The case is different with the Sacramental Liturgy of Rome. 
 
 Whether we look to the text which Gregory the Great found, 
 or to his own, or to the present official text, we find throughout, 
 only in an increasing ratio, the character of the service changed 
 from one preeminently thanksgiving to one of precatory prayers : 
 the wish to propitiate becomes more and more predominant. Who- 
 ever compares this rite with that of the Greek Churches, will be 
 struck by this immense difference; and any one who has studied 
 the history of the religions of ancient Greece and Rome philo- 
 sophically will agree with me, when I say that this difference is 
 exactly of the same character as that which we discover in the 
 doctrine and rites of the sacrifices of the ancient Romans and 
 Hellenes. To propitiate God, and to make a covenant with Him 
 under the most cautious, binding, and solemn clauses and formu- 
 laries, is the standing character of Roman religion. It certainly, 
 therefore, cannot be considered a step in advance, that the 
 Roman ritual became very early, in this decisive part, the general 
 order of the West. The original national Liturgies of Gaul and 
 Spain, and of Milan, were much nearer the Greek model. Still 
 the predominance of the Roman formulary was not entirely due 
 to Carlovingian protection and Roman ingenuity and power. 
 The Roman ritual had also its striking excellencies. The 
 Galilean, Gothic, and Alemannic rituals are lengthy, full of 
 rhetorical amplification and unnecessary details, often mere de- 
 clamations ; whereas the Roman formulary is distinguished, 
 particularly in consequence of Gregory's judicious and, for the 
 age in which he lived, tasteful reform, by that solemn concise- 
 ness which we admire in all the formularies of Roman antiquity. 
 It was very natural, that classical terseness and metropolitan 
 conciseness should prevail over provincial verbosity, of which S t. 
 Hilary's Prayer for the Dead furnishes a striking instance. 
 
 The Germanic mind, on the contrary, has always shown an 
 irresistible affinity with the Hellenic mind, as well as with that 
 spirit of filial thankfulness and gladness which is breathed in 
 the Gospel and the Apostolic times. 
 
BYZANTINE AND ROMAN SERVICES. 171 
 
 IV. The General Character of the Communion Services of the 
 present Byzantine and Roman Churches. 
 
 The solemn oblation, or act of offering of the people, origin- 
 ally formed the opening of the Communion Service : and was 
 the real primitive offertory. Subsequently, this real oblation 
 ceased ; but the public oblation prayer of the priest remained, 
 as the beginning of the prayer of consecration. The offertory 
 became a mere sacerdotal prayer, accompanied by an an- 
 tiphony sung by the choir. Subsequently, the old oblation 
 prayer became a secret prayer of the priest, and the Offer- 
 tory before the Preface was amplified into a very long offer- 
 torial service, referring only to the sacerdotal person about 
 to offer the sacrifice. The priest had, indeed, become in the 
 meantime the only acting person, and his recital of the words 
 of Institution the culminating point, instead of the sacrifice of 
 the worshij)pers. Thus the reality was more and more evan- 
 escent: the very idea of the Communion became a contradiction 
 in terms : for, even if there was a communion of the people, it 
 did not take place where it is marked in the service, but after 
 the prescribed service was over. 
 
 It was very necessary, therefore, that many of the prayers 
 of the fifth and sixth centuries should be read low, not aloud, 
 for they had lost their meaning, and had become a mere form. 
 
 The Greek Church has retained the type which was im- 
 printed in the fifth century, and has become petrified with and 
 in it. Her canon of the Communion Service comes much nearer 
 to the ancient Church than does the Roman one, especially from 
 her retaining the Invocation of the Holy Spirit after the words 
 of Institution, and thereby rendering it impossible for any but 
 theologians to fall into the error of supposing that the con- 
 secration consisted in the historical repetition of the words of 
 Institution instead of the prayer. She has, moreover, in spite 
 of the predominance of the sacerdotal and vicarious element, so 
 far faithfully maintained the principle that this solemnity is an 
 act of the congregation, that she celebrates it in the language 
 of the congregation ; whereas the Roman Church has forced 
 her Latin on all the western nations. 
 
 Lastly, also, the mention of the departed adheres closer to 
 
172 INTERPRETATION AND APPLICATION. 
 
 the spirit of tlie ancient Church ; and masses for the dead, in 
 the sense of the Roman Church, are unknown to her. 
 
 But, in the fifth century, it had ceased to be the custom for 
 the congregation, when assembled for service, to receive the 
 Communion ; and the real oblation had ceased with it. The 
 latter had now become, instead of a symbol of the internal 
 sacrifice, a simulacrum of a symbol ; consequently, a symbol of 
 the offering of the elements by the people, which had disappeared 
 or fallen into the background ; consequently, of the body and 
 blood of Christ also; and, consequently, of his propitiatory death : 
 consequently, of the historical propitiatory sacrifice, not of the 
 actual thank-offering of the communicating congregation. The 
 Greek Church knows nothing of the dogma of Transubstantiation ; 
 but the Liturgy, and the whole Communion Service, may produce, 
 upon the mind of a person who approaches them with that precon- 
 ceived opinion, the impression that it originated in the same view. 
 The Liturgy of the Greek Church is just as stiff" and dead as 
 the Roman is, and considerably longer besides. The Roman, 
 when compared with the Greek and even the Ambrosian and 
 Gallican rituals, appears to have been compiled from forms 
 which had become obscure and unintelligible. Her canon was, 
 also, in reality fixed much later in the fifth century, and de- 
 finitively at the end of the sixth ; and, of all the Western 
 Churches, deviates the most from the original character. The 
 real Consecration Prayer is omitted, and, on the other hand, the 
 words of Institution are brought into a prominence entirely 
 foreign to the sense of the ancient Church. It is true that the 
 canon recognizes the character of the Celebration as an oflTerina" 
 of praise and thanksgiving, but there is little praise and no 
 thanksgiving. Great stress, on the other hand, is laid upon 
 such forms as gradually drew off" the consciousness of the 
 Church from the People to the Elements, from the Thank- 
 offering of the believers to the repetition of the Sacrifice of 
 Atonement. Thus, also, the canon still implies the Com- 
 munion of the congregation ; but it had already become more 
 of a formality, and since that time has grown into a mere 
 form. The congregation never communicates at the Lord's 
 Supper, but after the Communion Service is over, although the 
 
SERVICE OF REFORMED CHURCHES. 173 
 
 words of Gregory's canon require the contrary ; and it is the 
 same in the Greek Church. The whole celebration of the 
 Koman mass is the act of the priest, who sacrifices the Lord's 
 body, and thereby repeats the propitiatory sacrifice of Christ ; 
 not as a custom which is misunderstood, or as a false interpre- 
 tation of the words of the Liturgy, but as a doctrine. 
 
 Scholasticism has erected into dogma that perversion of the 
 fundamental idea of sacrifice and priesthood, which had sprung 
 up unnoticed out of the change of custom. It has estabhshed 
 the displacement of the centre of consciousness as the real ex- 
 clusive consciousness of the Church, out of which grew the 
 Masses for the Dead, Purgatory, Indulgences, and all their 
 cognate abuses, elevated into doctrines. This formative process 
 is a development, connected in all its parts : but this connexion is 
 that of a development which leads down, pathologically, from 
 life to death ; from the spirit to the misinterpreted letter ; from 
 essence to external form. 
 
 The first problem, then, was to restore the real sacrifice : the 
 sacrifice of self, vowed by the worshippers in thankful love. The 
 second problem was to restore the equilibrium between service 
 and practice; ritualism and ideality; vow of sacrifice and a do- 
 mestic, social, and political life of real sacrifice. Did the Re- 
 formation solve the first problem ? Did the Christian States 
 \mderstand the second? We have here to answer the first 
 question. 
 
 V. The Service of the Reformed Churches. 
 
 When the Reformation led to the restoration of the Christian 
 worship on the basis of the Evangelical and Apostolicalinstitutions, 
 and when the service was consequently again performed in the 
 language spoken by the people, the Lutheran Churches adopted, 
 as a basis to be reformed, the Latin Mass ; whereas Calvin re- 
 gulated his services upon a system of abstract notions. The 
 former were carried, against their will, into the conventionalism 
 and errors of the Roman Church ; and the scholasticising philo- 
 
174 INTERPRETATION AND APPLICATION. 
 
 sophy of Luther in his later period, and of the Lutheranizers, 
 as to the elements, is based upon that medieval misunderstanding. 
 Calvin, on the other hand, substituted for the historical form a 
 Celto-Romanic abstraction. Thus the idea of sacrifice, as held 
 by the ancient Church, the most important thought and divine 
 work of Apostolical Christianity, did not come to new birth in 
 either branch of the Reformed Churches. The ceremony re- 
 tained its dignity in both, by virtue of the inward power of the 
 Evangelical faith, and the strength of the ethic thought, as well 
 as by the efficacy of the momentous act of redemption by Christ, 
 on which the solemnity rests. In the Lutheran Church, the 
 Spirit found an expression for the internal sacrifice in inspired 
 hymns ; whereas the Calvinists, under the influence of Biblio- 
 latry, made the spirit of the Old Testament, as poured out in 
 the Psalms, the expression of their praise and thankful worship 
 in Christ, made the morning star the light of noon. In both 
 Churches, however, the sermon, the doctrinal element, pre- 
 dominated so beyond all proportion, that common prayer, as the 
 act of the congregation, the popular element in the Church of 
 the people, almost entirely disappeared. 
 
 The old conventionalism naturally died gradually away, but 
 unfortunately only after the Protestants had made a fatal con- 
 troversy about it among themselves, and had surrendered their 
 interests, which were those of faith and of personal and political 
 liberty, into the hands of the aggressive Papacy. The pre- 
 dominating didactic element, however, destroyed the Service, 
 inasmuch as it made it tedious, so that it gradually appeared in 
 the eyes of the upper classes as useless for them, unless 
 rendered attractive by a display of rhetorical eloquence. The 
 ceremony of the Lord's Supper stood as a ruin, kept up solely 
 by. the moral earnestness and internal efficacy of the religious 
 consciousness of the worshippers. The historical idea of the 
 Ecclesiastical year was set aside at the very outset by the 
 Reformers, because they found it obscured by its connexion 
 with the worship of Saints, and there was not reconstructive 
 spirit enough in the age to restore it. By the Lutherans it 
 was adopted, but merely as a tradition. 
 
 The English Church, in her Articles, started from Calvin's 
 
SERVICE OF REFORMED CHURCHES. 175 
 
 point of view ; but her doctrinal theology was never so 
 developed as to attract any attention in Europe : in her liturgical 
 reformation she adopted the Lutheran method. The political 
 instinct of the people, however, seized hold of the idea inherent 
 in the old forms, that the service is an act of the congregation. 
 The Church of England restored the activity of which the 
 medieval choir had deprived the people, and called upon them 
 to speak, when they were unable to sing. It was only in 
 cathedrals and abbeys that choral singing was retained, and the 
 choristers sang what the people understood and had before 
 them. Yet, as this liturgical restoration could not proceed 
 from a leading reconstructive idea, and left no space for the 
 action of the free element, it was neither organic nor catholic. 
 Still less, in spite of the auspicious commencement, was the 
 development an organic and catholic one. The service became 
 more and more overcharged with peculiar, and in part wholly 
 accidental, accumulations and repetitions. Nevertheless, as 
 this Liturgy is the only product of the sixteenth and seventeenth 
 centuries deserving of any notice, and as it has attained, owing 
 to its dignified character, and the world-wide dominion of 
 England, an unrivalled position and influence, it must be the 
 centre of the reflex of the liturgical state of the Protestant 
 Churches in the mirror of the ancient Church. 
 
 In so doing, we meet at once with a very serious loss in the 
 natural elements of Christian devotion. The ancient Church 
 recognizes three kinds of common prayer: silent prayer, free 
 prayer, and here and there short forms sanctioned by custom, 
 watchwords, as it were, either for the minister alone, or for the 
 clergy and the people jointly. The English Liturgy admits 
 neither silent prayer nor free utterance in the service ; the 
 result of which is, that the two most spiritual forms, which are 
 the natural complements of formularized prayer and exhortation, 
 are excluded ; and it is only in very rare exceptions that a 
 choice is given between two formularies directed to the same 
 object. The solemn pause in the service of ordination, imme- 
 diately before the Veni Creator, is the only instance of that 
 silent prayer which, in the ancient Church, is presupj^osed by 
 every Collect, as the very name of Collect proves. 
 
176 INTERPRETATION AND APPLICATION. 
 
 The ancient Church recognizes, moreover, together with the 
 Psahns of the Old Testament, of which she made a free use, the 
 psahns and hjmns of the New Covenant, as the highest and 
 most natural expression of the inspiration of the congregation. 
 The English Church does not introduce into her service, 
 ecclesiastically, as a part of the Liturgy, any sacred Christian 
 hymns whatever. Translations of psalms in rhyme can never 
 be anything but a good thing spoiled. The Psalms themselves 
 she uses in succession, two or three, even four, without any 
 interruption except by the Gloria Patri. Such a use is con- 
 trary to the wise canon of Laodicea, of the year "ZQ^ (Bingham, 
 xiii. 5. 7.), and, what is more, contrary to the principle of the 
 service. But the whole idea of singing every month the 
 hundred and fifty psalms, divided between the morning and 
 evening services of the thirty or thirty-one days, is unspiritual. 
 It is not adopted on principle, but simply taken from tlie 
 existing practice of the clergy. At the bottom of this practice 
 lies that unintellectual view, which, in barbarous ignorance of 
 their origin, considers the Psalms as a collection made (by king- 
 David, of course) for the service of the Church ; whereas they 
 state themselves to be five collections of ancient national and 
 private hymns, destined only exceptionally for the Church 
 service, hymns of all epochs, and from the days of Moses and 
 David (whose songs are said to end with the 42nd Psalm) down 
 to those of Ezra. The only hymns which were composed 
 strictly for the Temple service are, with some few exceptions, 
 those which date from after the Captivity. Now, if the reason 
 of reading them so frequently during the service were, that they 
 are a part of Scripture, not a word could be said against such a 
 use of the whole Book of Psalms, especially if its contents and 
 purport were properly explained to the people. But the 
 singing of the congregation is meant to be the expression of the 
 most inward feeling, the very feeling of adoration: and who 
 will maintain that the Psalms, which were not originally com- 
 posed for that purpose, are all of them adapted to being sung 
 by a Christian congregation in the act of worship, simply 
 because they are found in the Book of Psalms ? Their repetition 
 every month, moreover, creates a uniformity which can be only 
 
THE ENGLISH LITURGY. 17*7 
 
 tolerable from the force of habit, or the Roman idea of the 
 opus operatum. Even the Greek and Roman Churches make 
 no such call upon their congregations. 
 
 The Roman Church had, moreover, lost in the dark ages the 
 antiphonal recitation, which the organism of the Psalms 
 requires, every verse being divided into two hemistichs, which 
 correspond to each other. This was changed into chanting by 
 verses, a method purely arbitrary and spiritless, and, it may be 
 said, contrary to Scripture ; so that the second verse is con- 
 sidered as answering to the first (with which it is in no organic 
 connexion), the fourth to the third, and so on. This defect has 
 likewise been retained in the English Liturgy. Nor has an- 
 other practice of the early Church, and of the Jews, been 
 resorted to, that of the people repeating a striking hemistich, 
 which expresses the leading thought of the whole composition ; 
 as, for instance, in the 118th Psalm (which Christ sang with the 
 disciples after the last supper), the words, " His mercy endureth 
 for ever." 
 
 The ancient Church had evidently a great variety in her 
 Sunday service, which was sustained and held together by the 
 unity of the type. The idea of the ecclesiastical year was to 
 make the solar year the mirror of the revelation of God in the 
 history of the world, of which the life of Christ formed the 
 central point. Already in the ante-Nicene period this idea 
 was in some degree sketched out, and appears very strongly 
 marked in Hippolytus' lists of lessons in his Paschal Cycle. 
 Round that festival, and therefore round the vernal equinox, 
 the whole year is ranged : backwards, the celebration of the 
 death and sufferings of Christ, the Epiphany, and Christmas ; 
 forward, the feast of Pentecost, as being the epoch of the 
 descent of the Spirit and inauguration of the Church. The 
 Church in later times developed this idea, not organically and 
 clearly, it is true, but yet significantly, by means of the Sunday 
 Scripture-readings appropriated to the different festivals and 
 seasons, and the selection of psalms, and verses of psalms, inter- 
 mixed with proper hymns and odes. The English Church 
 has adopted the ecclesiastical year, expunging, indeed, every 
 thing which had any reference to the worship of saints, but 
 
 VOL. II. N 
 
178 INTERPRETATION AND APPLICATION. 
 
 omitting likewise every form expressing the peculiar character 
 of the season of the ecclesiastical year, with the exception of 
 some few appropriate portions of Scripture for the Sundays in 
 Advent and the fast-days. The cycle of Bible-reading adopted 
 by her, according to which the Old Testament (with a few 
 omissions, and including the Apocrypha) is to be read completely 
 through once every year, and the New, without any exception, 
 three times, shows little regard for the ecclesiastical year and 
 for the requirements of an intellectual and connected system of 
 reading. Among the liturgical products of the medieval Church 
 of Rome, the ordinances for the Holy Week, concluding with 
 Easter, occupy in every respect the first rank. They have even 
 some very ancient elements in them. But in the English 
 Liturgy the uniformity of the service is here only very slightly 
 broken through : the ancient forms are thrown away, and the 
 opportunity of making the people respond to the recital of the 
 Passion, by appropriate verses of psalms and hymns inserted at 
 the end of every section, is not thought of. 
 
 The morning and evening services suffer so much the more 
 from this dangerous uniformity, because, as already remarked, 
 the elements of silent and free prayer are excluded from them. 
 It is customary, moreover, to combine, on Sundays, the Morn- 
 ing Prayer with the detailed and lengthened Litany (a most 
 beautiful and impressive prayer in itself), and both of them 
 with the Communion service : that is to say, to make three 
 ordinances, which are entirely distinct in themselves, into one, 
 having no organic connexion, and abounding in repetitions. 
 
 The ancient Church had not, in the age of Hippolytus, 
 admitted into the general service itself that Creed which 
 was professed by candidates for baptism. This was done, how- 
 ever, by the Church of the succeeding centuries. The English 
 Church uses that Creed on all occasions at morning and evening 
 service, immediately after the reading of the New Testament, as 
 a congregational act, the officiating minister leading, and the 
 congregation repeating after him each separate sentence of it. 
 On the three great festivals, and the festivals of the Apostles, 
 the formulary of the later Trinitarian schoolmen, commonly, 
 that is, falsely, called by the name of Athanasius, is substi- 
 
THE ENGLISH LITURGY. 179 
 
 tuted ; a form never known in the East, and in the West only 
 introduced into the choral morning service intended exclusively 
 for the clergy. It is certainly in every respect infinitely less 
 adapted to be recited by the whole congregation than the Nicene 
 Creed. In the present Liturgy, the morning and evening 
 services commence with a fixed form of confession, composed by 
 Bucer, in itself very dignified, but too stiflP, and, with the 
 exception of a choice in the introductory sentences, uniform 
 throughout ; whereas the old Introit (although itself the w^eck 
 of an ancient rite, and the simulacrum of the Entrance of the 
 Gospel) offered a variety of words and of thought. The service 
 of confession is followed by the reading of the Psalms, preceded 
 by two responsive sentences. The Lord's Prayer (with which 
 the first book, according to medieval custom, awkwardly com- 
 menced) forms the connecting link between the act of confession 
 and the psalmody. 
 
 The most vital element which the English Church (as early 
 as 1549) has retained in this daily service is the old responsive 
 sentences, repeated alternately by the priest and congregation 
 after the Creed. They constitute a short intercessory prayer 
 comprised in collects, the greater part of which is also old. These 
 collects are a genuine Roman form, which suits particularly the 
 turn of the English mind. 
 
 The Liturgy, as a whole, is dignified throughout, although it 
 cannot be pronounced to be organic in itself, nor adapted for 
 general use in Christendom, still less for domestic use. We 
 must, however, from our point of view, consider the fact, that 
 a Book of Common Prayer has become a national institution, 
 as more important than all defects, and even all excellencies, of 
 detail. It is of all Church ordinances, since the Reformation, 
 the most important. It was a great and a blessed thought, this 
 placing in the hands of a Christian nation a book impressing 
 evangelical truths, not by abstract theological formulas, but by 
 an act of worship and edification, and in language intelligible 
 to the congregation. Such a book alone was capable of be- 
 coming a Church- and House-Book, and such it has become. 
 It is in itself as valuable as the Text-Book of the ancient 
 Church, the fragments of which we have endeavoured to restore, 
 
 N 2 
 
180 INTERPRETATION AND APPLICATION. 
 
 and in many points infinitely superior to it ; although, alas ! less 
 free, and breathing less of faith in that Christian Spirit which 
 inspires the praying or teaching speaker. No Church in Christ- 
 endom has yet carried out those liturgical ideas with the same 
 dignity and completeness. The German Churches have, to this 
 day, produced only clerical liturgies and regulations, and even 
 the liturgical reform of Frederic William the Third has not 
 gone beyond that. The Order of Prayers (Agenda) is a book 
 for the clergy, and placed only in their hands. The Hymn- 
 books, as well as almost everything that is good since the time 
 of Luther, the German congregations have been obliged to work 
 out for themselves, amid bloody struggles, with all the dis- 
 advantages of isolation, and mostly under despotic forms of 
 government. 
 
 The most important portion of the great historical work of 
 the English Church, however, still remains to be noticed, the 
 Sunday Communion Service. She has here, from the very 
 beginning, struck out a deep thought, and undertaken the 
 solution of one of the greatest problems of the Reformation. 
 It is from this elevated point of view, that we must consider 
 the history of the Communion Service in particular, as a pro- 
 minent part in a universal history of the human mind during 
 the last three centuries. It is not merely that the Liturgy of 
 the Communion is important, on account of its very close con- 
 nexion with the political and civil wars of the seventeenth 
 century, and because it has also since that time led to the most 
 momentous theological controversies and schisms in the Church. 
 Nor does its chief importance consist even in this, that it con- 
 tains the most valuable ore of original English theology ; nor in 
 the fact, that the Book of Common Prayer and the Communion 
 Service in particular, its most intellectual part and its most 
 blessed, has done as much towards uniting the antagonistic 
 elements in the Lutheran and Reformed Churches, as the dog- 
 matic controversial writings, formulas of concord, and attempts 
 at union projected by the theologians of the Continent, have 
 done to divide the two Confessions, and to perpetuate their 
 scholastic disputes. Its highest importance consists in this, that 
 the Church of England has attacked, with seriousness and piety, 
 
FIRST BOOK OF EDWARD VI. 181 
 
 what has been to this hour one of the two great problems of 
 the Reformation. By this we mean the restoration of the real 
 Christian idea of sacrifice in its entire ethical and speculative 
 significance, and its realization in its true domain. For it is 
 only by both common prayer and Christian life being formed 
 into an organic congregational action, that an understanding 
 can be brought about between the contending parties, and the 
 hope indulged of a living progressive development of Christianity 
 and of Christian civilization throughout Europe and through 
 the world. We shall, therefore, have to examine that grand 
 national undertaking more closely in the reflex of our picture, 
 and the rather because, although many meritorious works upon 
 the subject of the English Liturgy (Note D.) exist, its histoi-y 
 has not yet been written from a general point of view. 
 
 1. The First Communion- Booh of Edward VI. 
 
 This work of Cranmer, Ridley, and their friends, as Royal 
 Commissioners, presents the following order. The preparatory 
 service begins with the ancient Introduction, or Introit : instead 
 of single verses of Psalms, a whole Psalm was to be sung ; then 
 the old Kyrie Eleison (Lord have mercy upon us), with the 
 Gloria (the old Morning Hymn after the Latin form). The 
 Epistle and Gospel are preceded, according to the Roman 
 custom, by the Collect for the day? after which one for the 
 King is inserted, followed by the Nicene Creed (not used at 
 Rome before 1014). After the sermon or homily follows an 
 Exhortation to the worthy receiving of the Sacrament of the 
 Lord's Supper, now about to be celebrated. The minister is 
 instructed to use it only when the sermon had not anticipated 
 it. This Exhortation, which begins with the words, 
 
 " Dearly beloved in the Lord, ye that mind to come to the Holy Com- 
 munion of the body and blood of our Saviour Christ, must con- 
 sider . . . ." 
 
 ends with an injunction to thankful self-sacrifice, as the proper 
 sacrifice of Christians : 
 
 N 3 
 
182 INTERPRETATION AND APPLICATION. 
 
 *' To Him (Christ) therefore, with the Father and the Holy Ghost, let 
 us give^ as we are most bounden, continual thanks, submitting 
 ourselves wholly to His holy will and pleasure, and studying to 
 serve Him in true holiness and righteousness all the days of our life." 
 
 If there be no communicants, instead of this exhortation 
 another is appointed to be read, in which notice is given that 
 the Lord's Supper will be celebrated on the following Sunday 
 or Holiday, and the congregation are invited to partake of it. 
 
 Immediately after the sermon, or after one of these exhorta- 
 tions has been read, the Offertory begins, accompanied by a 
 collection for the poor. While this is going on, one or more 
 sentences from the Bible, which enjoin charity or almsgiving, 
 are read or sung. After this the non-communicants withdraw : 
 the communicants take their places in the choir. Here, then, 
 commences the real Communion Service. The parts of it are 
 as follows : 
 
 I. The Preface, with the " Holy, Holy, Holy " (out of the Latin 
 
 Missal). 
 n. The general Intercessory Prayer : " Almighty and everlasting 
 God, who by Thy Holy Apostle hast taught us . . . ." 
 Prayer for the whole state of Christ's Church: essentially the 
 same as the present one, but with the following remarkable words 
 added at the end, referring to the dead : 
 " We commend unto Thy mercy, O Lord, all other Thy servants 
 which are departed hence from us with the sign of faith, and now 
 do rest in the sleep of peace. Grant unto them, we beseech 
 Thee, Thy mercy and everlasting peace ; and that at the day of 
 the general resurrection we and all they which be of the mystical 
 body of Thy Son, may altogether be set on His right hand, and 
 hear that His most joyful voice : Come unto me, O ye that be 
 blessed of my Father, and possess the kingdom which is prepared 
 for you from the beginning of the world. Grant this, Father, 
 for Jesus Christ's sake, our only Mediator and Advocate." 
 
 This is a remarkable attempt to reform the medieval intercessory 
 Prayer for the Dead on an evangelical basis. It bears a close 
 resemblance to the corresponding prayer of the third century in 
 the Church of Alexandria, which I have restored in my Reliquise 
 Liturgica?. 
 
FIRST BOOK OF EDWARD VI. 183 
 
 III. Consecration Prayer (Consecration of the Elements immediately 
 before the words of Institution) : " O God, Heavenly Father, 
 which of Thy tender mercy didst give . . . ." 
 
 " Hear us, O merciful Father, we beseech Thee, and ivith Thy 
 Holy Spirit and Word vouchsafe to bl>^ess and sancMify these 
 Thy Gifts and Creatures of bread and wine, that they may be 
 unto us the Body and Blood of Thy most dearly beloved Son 
 Jesus Christ, who in the same night," &c. (during the utterance 
 of which words the Priest takes the bread and cup in his hands). 
 
 IV. Sacrificial Prayer (Oblation) as continuation : 
 
 " Wherefore, O Lord and Heavenly Father ... we make here 
 before Thy Divine Majesty toith these Thy Holy gifts the me- 
 morial which Thy Son hath willed us to make .... entirely 
 desiring Thy fatherly goodness mercifully to accept this our sa- 
 crifice of praise and thanksgiving, most humbly beseeching Thee 
 to grant that ... we may obtain remission of our sins, and all 
 other benefits of his passion. And here we offer and present 
 unto Thee, Lord, ourself our souls, and bodies, to be a reason- 
 able, holy, and lively sacrifice unto Thee : humbly beseeching 
 Thee that whosoever shall be partakers of this Holy Communion 
 may . ... be made one body ivith Thy Son Jesus Christ, that 
 He may dwell in them and they in Him. Amen." 
 
 V. The Lord's Prayer. " As our Lord and Saviour hath commanded 
 
 and taught us, we are bold to say : Our Father,'' &c. (without the 
 Doxology). 
 
 VI. The act of Confession : Salutation of Peace. Introductory sen- 
 tences by the Choir. Thanksgiving for Christ's Sin-Offering. 
 Exhortation to Confession of Sins. Absolution. Sentences from 
 the Gospel inviting to the Communion. 
 
 Vn. Concluding Collect before administering the Elements : 
 
 " We do not presume to come to this Thy table, O merciful Lord, 
 trusting in our own righteousness, but in Thy manifold and great 
 mercies. We be not worthy so much as to gather up the crumbs 
 under Thy table. But Thou art the same Lord, whose property 
 is always to have mercy : Grant us, therefore, gracious Lord, so 
 to eat the flesh of Thy dear Son Jesus Christ and to drink His 
 blood, in these holy mysteries, that we may continually dwell in 
 Him, and He in us, that our sinful bodies may be made clean by 
 His body, and our souls washed through his most precious blood. 
 Amen." 
 
 VIII. Administration of the Lord's Supper, after the prie-t has first 
 received it himself, in both kinds. 
 
 N 4 
 
184 INTERPRETATION AND APPLICATION. 
 
 We remark tliat the authors, while carefully omitting every- 
 thing opposed to the pure doctrine, show a scrupulous anxiety 
 not to lose any one of the elements or forms of the ancient 
 Church which might be retained. The prayer in which the 
 dead are mentioned is still a prayer for the dead, but in the 
 sense of the Hippolytan age, and with an attempt at an 
 evangelical development. In the Consecration Prayer the 
 Liturgy has not yet been able to free itself entirely from the 
 Elements. The Blessing through the Spirit and the Word 
 (namely, through the words of Institution) is invoked upon the 
 prayer, not upon the congregation ; whereas the Apostolical 
 Church prayed originally for the blessing only upon the con- 
 gregation, to which subsequently was added a blessing for the 
 gifts; just as in baptism the Spiiit was invoked to sanctify the 
 water for the sanctification of the Catechumens. The idea of 
 Consecration, however, was not merely retained as a prayer, in 
 contradistinction to the erroneous notion of the Lutheran 
 Church, but a really spiritual sacrificial prayer was added, which 
 is, to this hour, the best and most complete ecclesiastical ex- 
 pression of the true Christian sacrifice of Self. This prayer is 
 the most important part of the whole Liturgy. Its contents 
 are derived directly from the fundamental thought of the Re- 
 formation. It is a realization of the doctrine of Justification in 
 the form of a vow, as the type of the sacrifice of love in the life 
 of the Christian. The conception is as appropriate as it is 
 dignified. Our former remarks have shown how such a thought 
 alone explains the act of the earliest Church, and the con- 
 sciousness of the earliest Fathers in respect to it. No one who 
 enters into the whole spirit of Palmer's Church views can 
 wonder that that learned man should not have acknowledged 
 this originality ; indeed, he has thrown that most important 
 prayer rather into the back-ground, because he does not find 
 a warrant for it in ancient rituals. This is very natural. For 
 all he aims at is to find what he thinks canonical authority for 
 the formularies and articles of his owii Church in the post- 
 Nicene, and, if possible, in that of the middle ages. He refers 
 the English formularies to those real or supposed precedents, 
 which are, in his opinion, models. Everything new, however 
 
FIRST BOOK OF EDWARD VI. 185 
 
 Christian and Scriptural, he considers as a deviation, which he 
 laments as a defect, and thinks himself bound to justify, or 
 I'ather to excuse, althougli he usually denies that there is any. 
 Such a proceeding seems unwarranted either by historical or 
 philosophical criticism. It is painful, however, to find the 
 following remark in a German critic like Daniel, who in other 
 places does not conceal his noble indignation at Palmer's pro- 
 ceeding. When offering a judgment upon the Collect of 
 Thanksgiving in the present Prayer-book, which is borrowed 
 from this passage, lie says that its contents (siiigula) are taken 
 from the private prayer of the priest in the Roman mass after 
 the congregation are dismissed : " Placeat, sancta Trinitas, 
 obsequium servitutis meee, et praesta ut sacrificium quod oculis 
 tuae majestatis indignus obtuli, tibi sit acceptabile, mihique et 
 omnibus pro quibus illud obtuli sit, te miserante, propitiabile." 
 
 It is needless to remark, that the place assigned in this older 
 Liturgy of King Edward to that expression of sacrifice is in 
 every respect the correct one. This is the place for the highest 
 realization of the act of sacrifice announced by the Preface. 
 The sacrifice immediately precedes the Communion, the Lord's 
 Prayer forming the connecting link : for the Lord's Supper 
 is the holy act of faith which seals the renewed vow of thankful 
 love. 
 
 We may, oh the other hand, entertain a doubt whether the 
 position assigned to the act of confession, at the head of the 
 real Communion, is the proper one. The ancient Church took 
 care not to disturb the expression of highest thankfulness and 
 praise by exhortation to repentance, and by the whole act of 
 confession. This act constituted, in one form or other, a por- 
 tion of the Preparatory Service : a later custom of the Lutheran 
 Church connects it directly with the sermon. If we choose, 
 however, to consider it as a necessary preparation for partaking 
 of the Lord's Supper, an especial preparatory service of con- 
 fession would seem better suited to that purpose. In this 
 place it comes too late for an introductory internal self-ex- 
 amination, and is disturbing as a liturgical form. 
 
 This blessed work of the two martyrs of the Gospel was the 
 first step taken by the English Church to make the Service, 
 
186 INTERPRETATION AND APPLICATION. 
 
 instead of an opus operatum of the clergy, once more the act of 
 the congregation, and to establish upon it the Christian Sacrifice 
 stripped of its Levitical disguise. 
 
 It did not, however, fully satisfy the feelings of Protestants, 
 who by persecution and bitter controversy were excited to op- 
 position and distrust, and who were so deeply offended with 
 some too medieval forms and expressions which were still 
 retained, that they rejected and repudiated them as suspicious, 
 even in such a purified form. 
 
 2. The Second Book of Edivard VI., 1552. 
 
 Thus, then, under the advice of the German Bucer (who com- 
 posed the Introduction to the daily Morning and Evening 
 Services), and of the Florentine Peter Martyr, the Book of 
 Common Prayer was re-written, as early as in 1552; and with 
 it, the Order of the Communion in the first book set aside. 
 This reconstruction is very important, and, together with the 
 not very considerable alterations made in 1559 and 1604, and 
 especially at the Restoration (1662), forms the present English 
 Liturgy. We shall give a complete analysis of it when we arrive 
 at the period of 1662. 
 
 In the Second Book of Common Prayer of Edward VI., 
 according to the precedent of the Genevan Church, the deca- 
 logue is placed at the head of the Communion Service, and a 
 long and tedious, because too frequent, didactic reading is very 
 sensibly converted into a congregational act by the short response 
 of the people, in the form of a prayer, after each commandment. 
 In the Intercessory Prayer the petition for the dead is omitted, 
 and a Thanksgiving substituted for it. In like manner, the 
 medieval consecration of the elements is changed into a petition 
 for a blessing on the communicants. All these are palpable 
 improvements. But from a dread of a false view of Sacrifice 
 creeping in, some most beautiful, most important, and most 
 universal portions of the ancient Communion Service are here 
 omitted, and the idea of the Christian Sacrifice is simply ex- 
 pressed as a voluntary appendix, namely, as a collect, following 
 
laud's liturgy for SCOTLAND. 187 
 
 the Communion (post-communio), which may be used instead 
 of the ordinary collect of Thanksgiving borrowed from the Latin 
 Ritual. And so strange are the changes in the human mind 
 upon religious subjects, so long as the matter is not brought 
 fully home to the general Christian feeling, that this second 
 collect, at that time an ultra-Protestant one (because it had no 
 reference to sacrifice), has again become, in our time, the fa- 
 vourite collect of those who estimate the value of a liturgical 
 form by its being found in the Rituals of the medieval Church. 
 
 3. Laud's Communion Liturgy for Scotland. 
 
 The reconstruction of the Liturgy in a Protestant sense was 
 very far from satisfying the Presbyterian party among the clergy. 
 As early as the time of James I., the reaction which began to 
 show its face in the latter part of the reign of Elizabeth, and 
 which was secretly encouraged by her, was publicly avowed, and 
 strove openly for the mastery, under the favour of a monarch 
 equally narrow-minded as a composer of a Liturgy, as he was 
 pitiful as a king. James L, who wished, for political reasons, 
 to make Scotland episcopal, had planned the introduction of the 
 English Liturgy into that country. Laud, however, and his 
 friends in Scotland, thought they could make use of this scheme 
 to further their views of bringing the Scottish Liturgy back to 
 the medieval, by means of the English. Such was the origin, 
 after long secret preparation, of the Communion Liturgy which 
 was intended for Scotland, and which, in 1637, Charles L, by force 
 of the royal prerogative, "after hearing the clergy," endeavoured 
 to force upon the people. It is well known that it was the 
 cause of the outbreak, and one of the causes of the rebellion 
 which brought the archbishop, and afterwads the king himself, 
 to the scaffold. As it forms the basis of the present Commu- 
 nion Liturgy of the Episcopal Church of Scotland, and, in part, 
 of that of the United States, and as it is the expression 
 of an ecclesiastical view which now again strives for the ascen- 
 dancy, we subjoin a complete synopsis of its contents from the 
 unaltered original version. 
 
188 INTEEPRETATION AND APPLICATION. 
 
 After the Commandments (which were left untouched), the reading 
 of the Epistle and Gospel, the Nicene Creed, and the Sermon, the 
 real Communion Service followed. 
 
 A. The Offertory, reconstructed into a symbolical sacrificial office. 
 
 It begins with sacrificial sentences : from the Sacrifice of Abel 
 (Gen. xiv. 3 — 5.); from the Levitical sacrifice (Ex. xxv. 2.; 
 Numb. xvi. 16.); from David's Thanksgiving at the consecra- 
 tion of the gifts for the building of the Temple (1 Chron. 
 xxix. 10, 11, 12. 14. 17.; the words of ver. 14. became 
 liturgical at an early period, and are here applied with spirited 
 freedom : " Of Thine own do we give unto Thee"); closing with 
 the verse of Psalm xcvi. 8. : " Asci'ibe to the Lord the honour 
 due unto His name : bring presents, and come into His courts." 
 
 The sentences applying to almsgiving in the English Liturgy (see 
 above, L) then follow immediately after these sacrificial sen- 
 tences. 
 
 When these are ended, the priest takes into his hands the basin, 
 which is presented to him, containing the alms, places it upon the 
 altar, and orders the bread and wine for the Communion. 
 
 B. General Intercessory Prayer (Prayer for the whole state of Christ's 
 
 Church Militant here on earth, see above, II.). Instead of the 
 Prayer for the Dead, the following is here introduced : 
 "And we also bless Thy holy name for all those Thy servants who, 
 having finished their course in faith, do now rest from their 
 labours. And we yield unto Thee most high praise and hearty 
 thanks for the wonderful grace and virtue declared in all Thy 
 saints who have been the choice vessels of Thy grace, and the 
 lights of the world, in their several generations : Most humbly 
 beseeching Thee that we may have grace to follow the example 
 of their stedfastness in Thy faith, and obedience to Thy holy com- 
 mandments, that, at the day of the general resurrection, we, and 
 all they," &c. (as above). 
 
 C. After the Intercessory Prayer, an exhortation is enjoined to be read 
 
 from time to time, either inviting communicants to the Lord's 
 Supper, or warning them against the unworthy receiving of it, 
 revisions of the formularies of the First Book of Edward VI. 
 There is prescribed, however, for every holiday (after the non- 
 communicants have withdrawn), an Admonition to the worthy 
 receiving of the Lord's Supper : " Dearly beloved in the Lord, ye 
 that mind to come . . . ." (as in both the Books of Edward VI.). 
 
 D. Acts of Confession, Invitation, Creed, Absolution, Sentences (ac- 
 
laud's liturgy for SCOTLAND. 189 
 
 cording to the form in the Second Book of Edward VI., see above, 
 VII.). 
 
 E. Prefiice with " Holy, Holy, Holy " (see above, I.). 
 
 F. Consecration Prayer (see above, III.), an intermediate form between 
 
 the First and Second Books of Edward VI. : " Almighty God, 
 our Heavenly Father, which of Thy tender mercies .... Hear 
 us, O merciful Father, we most humbly beseech Thee ; and of Thy 
 Almighty goodness vouchsafe so to bless and sanctify ivith Thy 
 Word and Holy Spirit these Thy gifts and creatures of bread 
 and loine, that they may be unto us the body and blood of Thy 
 most dearly beloved Son ; so that we, receiving them according 
 to Thy Son our Saviour Jesus Christ's holy institution, in remem- 
 brance of His death and passion, may be partakers of the same 
 His most precious body and blood, who in the night," &c. 
 
 G. Prayer of Oblation : "Wherefore, O Lord our Heavenly Father," 
 
 &c., word for word as in the First Book (see above, IV.) ; only 
 that in the oflTering of the Oblation, after the words, " with these 
 Thy Holy Gifts," the following are added : " which we noiv offer 
 unto Thee." 
 
 H. The Lord's Prayer (see above, V.). 
 
 I. Concluding Prayer : " We do not presume," &c. (see above VII.). 
 
 It is obvious that the older form is deliberately adopted, and 
 here and there rendered more complete ; in the Offertory, 
 for instance ; but every thing in a reactionary sense. Instead 
 of expressing more strongly the spiritual sacrifice, for that was 
 the problem which the sixteenth century undertook, but did not 
 entirely succeed in solving, the Levitical one, on the contrary, 
 is here, and in the Consecration and Oblation, more strongly 
 marked ; with a decided tendency towards the medieval idea of 
 the eucharistic sacrifice, that is to say, the sacrifice in the cele- 
 bration of the Lord's Supper. 
 
 Here also the blessing "through the Word and the Spirit" 
 is prayed for; so that the power of the Word is brought more 
 prominently forward : and it cannot be denied that by the 
 *' Word " we are not to understand the creative Word of God, 
 the Word in the highest sense, but the words of Institution : 
 " This is my body." By this the expression of self-sacrifice, which 
 is retained here from the First Book of Edward VI., is entirely 
 thrown into the background: it is a reaction to Levitical forms, 
 under the delusion or pretext of an Apostolical restoration. 
 
190 INTEKPRETATION AND APPLICATION. 
 
 The Protestant feeling of the people against Laud's Liturgy 
 was therefore a very correct one, and a real voice of God. 
 There was concealed behind the Liturgical archaism a theology 
 which, if carried out consistently, must have led back to 
 Romanism. There was besides a sacerdotal pretension, which 
 made the priest who was qualified by episcopal succession and 
 episcopal consecration (as the exclusive vehicle of sacramental 
 grace which is necessary to salvation) to be the lord of the 
 conscience and the dispenser of salvation. As regards the 
 learning of Laud, and his older and more modern spiritual 
 brethren, it is exactly on a footing with his knowledge of 
 Christian architecture, by virtue of which he enjoined that the 
 altar should be evei-ywhere placed at the end of the apse (the 
 position of the old cathedra) in honour of antiquity and 
 tradition. It is a spiritless knowledge of medieval traditions 
 arbitrarily preferred to really ancient Christianity, and a 
 conventional scholasticism irreconcilable with historical and 
 philosophical criticism. The most innocent form is a poor 
 provincial antiquarianism, the only effect of which can be to 
 disturb the conscience, and impede the light of a living future. 
 
 4. Tfie present established Communion Service of the Church of 
 E7igland, 1559, 1604, and 1662. 
 
 After the points of contrast between the old and new 
 Liturgies, as well as between such formularies and free prayer 
 and speech, had been, in the course of the seventeenth century, 
 variously combated by both parties, for the most part with one- 
 sided arguments, but with great zeal and animosity, the National 
 Liturgy took its present form, in its essential points, at the 
 Restoration (1662), after the Savoy Conference, the results of 
 which v^^ere unsatisfactory. It subsequently was to undergo a 
 final revision under William III. in 1689; but the proposals of 
 the Royal Commissioners not receiving the assent of Convocation, 
 they were accordingly dropped. This was the last attempt at a 
 definitive settlement of the Liturgy. 
 
laud's liturgy for SCOTLAND. 191 
 
 The order, compared with the more ancient, is as follows. 
 After the Sermon, in conformity with the natural interpretation 
 of the rubric, the Offertory always follows : sentences which 
 enjoin charity and almsgiving being read during the collection 
 of alms. 
 
 But if there be no communicants, it is doubtful whether the 
 General Prayer of the Church is not to be omitted. The rubric 
 is very ambiguous, and the ordinary practice, at least of the last 
 150 years, is so strongly in favour of that interpretation, that 
 even the Offertory is left out when there are no communicants, 
 the Service concluding with the Sermon and one of the Collects 
 annexed, expressive of the blessing attached to the hearing of 
 the Word of God. If notice is to be given for the following 
 Sunday of the celebration of the Lord's Supper, it is to be done 
 at that time by means of an exhortation borrowed entirely from 
 the earlier Liturgy. 
 
 But the omission of the Offertory, so clearly prescribed, 
 proves that this custom is the natural, but very much to be 
 regretted, consequence of the Morning Service having been 
 made practically (with the Liturgy) the first part of the Com- 
 munion Service. People found the Service too long, and thus 
 mutilated the most important concluding part. By this practice 
 the ordinary Sunday Service is deprived of the Act of Petition 
 and Thanksgiving, for which the congregation was to be " built 
 uj) " by the foregoing Service. The ordinary Service, without 
 Communion, is already shorn of the Preface, which, nevertheless, 
 has nothing whatever to do with the Communion as such, being 
 the introduction to the Act of Thanksgiving. But by that 
 custom it loses the act of Prayer itself, of which the Offertory 
 was to be only the symbol. The General Church Prayer is 
 indeed prescribed for this part of the Service in all the 
 ordinances, from the earliest down to those of the Protestant 
 Churches, with the single exception of the Prussian Liturgy of 
 1821. Thus the whole organization of the Service, typically 
 fixed from the most primitive times, would be destroyed if that 
 interpretation were the true one. It is impossible to ascribe 
 such thoughtlessness to the framers of the Liturgy. Besides, 
 it is asserted, that in some cathedrals and university chapels the 
 
192 INTERPRETATION AND APPLICATION, 
 
 custom of saying that General Prayer with the Offertory every 
 Sunday has always been maintained, and it is a fact that in the 
 Chapel Royal at St. James's both have been constantly used ; 
 and this seems to decide the question against the ordinary 
 practice. 
 
 In that beautiful General Intercessory Prayer (Prayer for 
 the whole state of Christ's Church militant here on earth) which 
 begins with the words, 
 
 " Almighty and everliving God, who by Thy Holy Apostle hast 
 taught . . . ." 
 
 the mention of those who have departed in faith, which was 
 altogether omitted in 155^, is restored, but without any 
 Intercession, perfectly free from the possibility of misunder- 
 standing and misinterpretation. Its dignified words are as 
 follows : 
 
 " And we also bless Thy holy name for all Thy servants departed 
 this life in Thy faith and fear : beseeching Thee to give us grace 
 so to follow their good examples, that with them we may le 
 partakers of Thy heavenly kingdom. Grant this, O Father, for 
 Jesus Christ's sake, our only Mediator and Advocate." 
 
 If we turn to the Gospel and the ancient Church, we shall 
 see clearly that this prayer might have been strengthened 
 without any danger, and with considerable effect, by adding 
 the thought now embodied in a collect of the Funeral Service, 
 after the Thanksgiving for the blessed departure of a deceased 
 brother : 
 
 " Beseeching Thee that it may please Thee of Thy gracious goodness 
 shortly to accomplish the number of Thy elect, and to hasten 
 Thy kingdom " 
 
 The Act of Confession corresponding essentially with No. VI. 
 of the earlier Service. 
 
 The Preface, with the " Holy ; " its position being altered 
 here from No. I. in the earlier Service. 
 
 Concluding Prayer before the Consecration (" We do not 
 presume," &c.) : word for word, the concluding Prayer, No. 
 
PRESENT ENGLISH LITURGY. 193 
 
 VII. of tlie older Version, before the distribution of the 
 elements. 
 
 Consecration Prayer (see above, III.). Here, in the principal 
 passage, the petition for blessing is very properly transferred 
 altogether from the elements to the communicants, and the 
 equivocal words " with Thy Holy Spirit and Word " are also 
 omitted : 
 
 " Hear us, O merciful Father, we most humbly beseech Thee, and 
 grant that we, receiving these Thy creatures of bread and wine, 
 according to Thy Son, our Saviour Jesus Christ's holy insti- 
 tution, in remembrance of His most blessed body and blood, who 
 in the same night," &c. 8fc. 
 
 After this the clergy receive the sacrament and administer it 
 to the congregation. 
 
 If we hold this Service up to the mirror of the ancient Church, 
 it is impossible not to recognize its great Christian wisdom, both 
 in that part of it which is borrowed from the ancient Church, 
 and that which is new. It is equally impossible, however, to 
 disguise from ourselves the fact that the problem which offered 
 itself to the consideration of the Church in the sixteenth century 
 is not solved. The organization of the ancient sacrifice is lost, 
 and that adopted for the new sacrifice is less completely de- 
 veloped than it was in the Liturgy of 1549. 
 
 The history of the Communion Service, and of the Liturgy 
 generally, ceases, as far as England is concerned, with the year 
 1662. But, when considered from a general Christian point of 
 view, the development of this most remarkable, and, after the 
 Bible, most widely circulated and most national book upon 
 earth, has by no means ceased. The whole received a thorough 
 reform in the Episcopal Church of the United States, which 
 has found its way through the vast body of the New Continent 
 from the Atlantic to the Pacific. Now this reform is, in the 
 Communion Service, considerably influenced by the Communiun 
 Liturgy of the Episcopal Church in Scotland, which was drawn 
 up after the middle of the last century. We therefore must 
 consider first this remarkable phase of the history of that 
 Liturgy. 
 
 VOL. II. O 
 
194 INTERPRETATION AND APPLICATION. 
 
 5. The present Communioti Service of the Episcopal Church of 
 
 Scotland. 
 
 After the Scotch Liturgy imposed by Charles I. in 1636 had 
 been developed by the influence of the Non- Jurors, after 1689, 
 more and more according to the medieval type (evidence of vi^hich 
 is found in the editions of 1724, 1743, and 1755, which I have 
 before me), all at once there appears, in the edition of 1764, a 
 second and more decided thorough revision of the Communion 
 Service in the spirit of Laud. Those bishops who, after the 
 expulsion of James IL, refused to take the oath of allegiance to 
 king William III. and his consort, put themselves as Non-Jurors 
 at the head of a reaction, and their successors in Scotland had 
 full liberty of action in a Sacerdotal Church abandoned by the 
 nation. Just as Laud had used Scotland as a lever for the 
 Catholicising reaction against the Protestantized Liturgy of 
 1552, so did that party make use of the Episcopal Church in 
 Scotland against the confirmation and reinforcement of Pro- 
 testant principles in 1689. That revision is to be considered as 
 the last product of that spirit of the seventeenth century, which 
 has in our days been re-awakened by a very considerable portion 
 of the Anglican clergy. It starts from that mistaken idea of 
 Sacrifice in the Communion, which we have pointed out as 
 being a corruption of the Christian views of the first three cen- 
 turies. But it merits consideration as an attempt cari'ied out 
 consistently, with great erudition and liturgical skill, albeit in a 
 one-sided spirit, to solve a still unsettled problem. It was 
 sanctioned in 1811 and 1838 for solemn occasions. The most 
 important part of it, moreover, has been adopted in the Episcopal 
 Church of the United States. Its peculiarity will be seen by 
 the following comparison with Laud's Liturgy : 
 
 After the Sermon : 
 
 A. Admonition : " Dearly beloved in the Lord, ye that mind to come 
 
 to the Holy Communion," &c. Out of the First Book of Ed 
 ward I., where it may nevertheless be omitted by the clergyman 
 (Laud, A.). 
 
 B. Offertory (compare Laud, B. : but much more developed). It 
 
SCOTTISH COMMUNION SERVICE. 195 
 
 begins with the Invocation to Sacrifice : " Let us present 
 our offerings to the Lord with reverence and godly fear, . . . ." 
 
 Tlien follow the Sacrificial Sentences from Laud. 
 
 The priest places upon the altar the basin with the collection which 
 has been made in the meantime, during which he utters a thanks- 
 giving to God, borrowed from the Prayer of David and the 
 Greek Liturgies (to express the sacrifice of the Thanksgiving), 
 and generally consisting of verses of Psalms : 
 
 " Blessed be Thou, O Lord God, for ever and ever : Thine, O Lord, 
 is the greatness, and the glory, and the victory, and the majesty: 
 for all that is in the heavens and the earth is Thine : Thine is 
 the kingdom, Lord, and Thou art exalted as head above all : 
 both riches and honour come of Thee, and of Thy oion do we 
 give unto Thee. Amen." 
 
 C. The Preface with " Holy . . ," (like Laud, E.). 
 
 D. The Consecration Prayer is exactly like those in Laud and First 
 
 Edward VL, and the New English one, except that the whole 
 passage in the middle about the Sacrifice is omitted, in which the 
 old and new formularies differ. The beginning only is somewhat 
 altered, out of fondness for the Greek models. Instead of " Al- 
 mighty God, who of Thy tender mercy," &c., it says : " All glory 
 be to Thee, Almighty God, our Pleavenly Father, for that Thou, 
 of Thy tender mercy," &c. 
 
 E. The Oblation with the Invocation agrees in its beginning and end 
 
 with Laud G. ; but in the middle the important passage of the 
 old Consecration Prayer, transcribed above, is inserted, which 
 was omitted in the new Consecration Prayer. The whole, there- 
 fore, runs thus : 
 
 " Wherefore, O Lord and Heavenly Father, . . . we . . . make 
 here before Thy divine Majesty, with these Thy holy gifts, 
 which ive now offer unto Thee, the memorial Thy Son hath 
 commanded us to make : having in remembrance His blessed 
 passion " 
 
 " And we most humbly beseech Thee, O merciful Father, to hear 
 us, and of Thy almighty goodness vouchsafe to bless and sanctify 
 with Thy "Word and Holy Spirit these Thy gifts and creatures of 
 bread and wine, that they may become " (here are omitted the 
 words '■'■unto us," which Laud retained,) "the body and blood of 
 Thy most dearly beloved Son. . ." 
 
 "And we earnestly desire Thy fatherly goodness mercifully to 
 
 o 2 
 
196 INTERPRETATION AND APPLICATION. 
 
 accept this our sacrifice of praise and Thanksgiving, &c." (as 
 above) .... Amen. 
 
 F. "Prayer for the whole state of Christ's Church." (Exactly like 
 
 Laud, C.) 
 
 G. The Lord's Prayer (Laud, H.). 
 H. Act of Confession (Laud, D.). 
 
 I. Concluding Collect (Laud, L). The administration of the Sacra- 
 ment follows. 
 
 So far, then, everything tended, by what appeared to some 
 hierarchical politicians, and many pious, but weak-headed and 
 half-learned priests, a conservative development, to bring back 
 the service of the English people, in the " Free " Episcopal 
 Church of Scotland, to the old Levitical Sacrifice. The doc- 
 trine of Transubstantiation was nothing more than a logical 
 scholastic consequence of such a Liturgy. It is true that the 
 service was still performed in the language of the people, and 
 that" the hierarchs inveighed against Rome. But this cannot 
 alter the spirit of the Liturgy. It would be a delusion, were 
 we to endeavour to explain this reaction, which is very important 
 although it never obtained universal adoption, as based upon 
 mere personal and transient motives and influences. Its origin 
 lies much deeper. Neither does it consist merely in the hier- 
 archical eiForts to make use of the Liturgy in order to restore 
 sacerdotal power. It consists essentially and permanently in 
 this, that the problem of the Reformation, in this domain like- 
 wise, is not yet conclusively solved. The singular phenomenon, 
 that exactly at the end of a hundred years this very same 
 sacrificial portion of the Non-Jurors' Liturgy should be inserted, 
 by the founders of the " Free " Episcopal Church in the United 
 States, into what is otherwise, in many respects, a progressive 
 step in the development of the English Liturgy, is a proof that 
 the erroneous portion of the fundamental idea of elementary 
 sacrifice can only be overcome and eradicated by the full re- 
 cognition and expression of the true spiritual sacrifice. We 
 must here not forget that the liturgical question in England was 
 in 1662 carried by a violent reaction, and in 1689 dropped, but 
 never solved. 
 
UNITED states' LITURGY. 197 
 
 6. The Liturgy of the Episcopal Church of the United States, 
 
 1789. 
 
 One of the distinguished heads of the Episcopal Church in 
 the United States, the late bishop Seabury, had something of 
 this feeling, when he and bishop White, and their friends, re- 
 solved upon a reform of their Church, both in constitution and 
 in Liturgy, after the War of Independence. 
 
 That Liturgy, as definitively settled since 1789, is a very 
 sparing, and not altogether free, though very important im- 
 provement upon the English one. The use of the Psalms is 
 rendered more tolerable, by a selection made with the direct 
 aim of expressing the feelings of worship of a Christian con- 
 gregation. The great want of Christian hymns has been re- 
 medied by an ecclesiastical collection, which has gradually 
 become considerable ; as indeed it never should fail to form an 
 integral part of the Church-Book. As to the Communion 
 Liturgy, its most striking feature, particularly when we con- 
 sider the political spirit of the United States, and the period in 
 which that Liturgy was established, is a return to the older 
 form of the English service, and an attempt to make a fusion 
 of the First Book of Edward VL, and its hierarchical revision 
 in Scotland in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, with 
 the Second more decidedly Protestant one, and the improve- 
 ments made in it in 1662 and proposed in 1689. The following 
 comparative survey will illustrate the nature of this connexion. 
 
 In the preparatory portion of the Sunday Service, it must be 
 mentioned to the credit of its compilers, that Christ's epitome of 
 the commandments is added to the decalogue. 
 
 After the Sermon there follows : 
 
 The Offertory, unaltered. 
 
 The Prayer for all conditions of the Church militant. 
 
 When there is no Communion the Service ends here ; if the Commu- 
 nion is to be administered the following Sunday, the clergyman 
 may read the whole or part of one of the two formularies of ex- 
 hortation borrowed from the English Liturgy. 
 
 The Act of Confession : precisely as in the English Liturgy. 
 
 The concluding Collect : the same. 
 
 o 3 
 
198 INTERPRETATION AND APPLICATION. 
 
 The Consecration Prayer : the form of the present English Liturgy, 
 omitting the above-cited passage, which contains the petition for 
 blessing upon the communicants, instead of the old invocation of 
 blessing on the elements. On the other hand there is a new 
 addition of 
 
 The Oblation Prayer, out of the First Book of Edward VI. (see 
 above, Y.), with the insertion of the Invocation contained in the 
 old Consecration Prayer as given above. In this the petition for 
 the blessing on the elements is borrowed from the First Book, 
 and the one for the blessing on the communicants from the 
 Second. To this is annexed the spiritual Oblation Prayer, 
 which, in the new English Liturgy, is transferred to the Post- 
 Communio. The result of the patchwork is (with a little gram- 
 matical inaccuracy) the following remarkable prayer : 
 *' Wherefore, O Lord and Heavenly Father, according to the insti- 
 
 r^, ^, . . tution of Thy dearly beloved Son our Saviour 
 The Oblation. ^ ^, . r.., , , , -. i 
 
 Jesus Christ, we. Thy humble servants, do cele- 
 brate and make here before Thy divine Majesty, with these 
 Thy Holy .gifts, which we now offer unto Thee, the memorial 
 Thy Son hath commanded us to make ; having in remembrance 
 His blessed passion and precious death, His mighty resurrection 
 and glorious ascension : rendering unto Thee most hearty thanks 
 for the innumerable benefits procured unto us by the same : and 
 rj^jjg we most humbly beseech Thee, O merciful Father, 
 
 Invocation. to hear us ; and of Thy almighty goodness 
 vouchsafe to bless and sanctify with Thy word and Holy Spirit 
 these Thy gifts and creatures of bread and wine ;. that we, re- 
 ceiving them according to Thy Son our Saviour Jesus Christ's 
 holy institution, in remembrance of his death and passion, may 
 be partakers of His most blessed body and blood. And we 
 earnestly desire Thy fatherly goodness mercifully to accept this 
 our sacrifice of praise and thanksgiving ; most humbly beseeching 
 Thee to grant, that by the merits and death of Thy Son Jesus 
 Christ, and through faith in His blood, we, and all Thy whole 
 Church, may obtain remission of our sins, and all other benefits 
 of His passion. And here we offer and present unto Thee, O 
 Lord, ourselves, our souls and bodies, to be a reasonable, holy, 
 and living sacrifice unto Thee ; humbly beseeching Thee, that we, 
 and all others who shall be partakers of this holy Communion, 
 may worthily receive the most precious body and blood of Thy 
 Son Jesus Christ, be filled with Thy grace and heavenly bene- 
 
RESULT OF PROTESTANT AMENDMENTS. 199 
 
 diction, and made one body with Him, that He may dwell in 
 them (us), and they (we) in Him, And although we are un- 
 worthy, through our manifold sins, to offer unto Thee any sacri- 
 fice, yet we beseech Thee to accept this our bounden duty and 
 service, not weighing our merits, but pardoning our offences, 
 through Jesus Christ our Lord ; by whom and with whom, in 
 the unity of the Holy Ghost, all honour and glory be unto Thee, 
 O Father Almighty, world without end. Amen." 
 
 Summary of the Results of the Protestant Measures for amend- 
 ing the Liturgy and restoring the Sacrifice. 
 
 If we cast our eyes, in tlie first place, on the English Church, 
 she will strike us at once as being marked by two grand ideas, 
 which render her conspicuous above all other Churches. The 
 first of these we may express thus. Her object was to place in 
 the hands of the people a national book of devotion, which 
 should elevate the religious service from being the peculiar 
 work and business of the clergy, into an object of the religious 
 consciousness of the nation, and place the form of common wor- 
 ship out of the reach of the caprice of any individual minister. 
 The second we may define thus. Her object was to restore the 
 idea of the Christian Sacrifice, as being the highest spiritual 
 act of the individual and congregation before God, and, with 
 the sacrament, the fundamental idea of the whole religious 
 worship. 
 
 These two ideas evidently have not been thoroughly carried 
 out, and are far from having obtained complete success. The 
 causes of this relative failure are partly internal, partly external, 
 defects. We have recognized in the mirror of the ancient 
 Church, that the English Liturgy is deficient in several elements, 
 but especially in those of free and silent prayer. This want of 
 freedom attaches to it in part from the condition out of which 
 the Church then arose ; in part from a certain degree of hesita- 
 tion or indifference which is as characteristic of the English 
 mind in ecclesiastical affiiirs, as it is foreign to it in political 
 
 O 4 
 
200 INTERPRETATION AND APPLICATION. 
 
 concerns. But this internal explanation of that fact is not 
 sufficient to account for the whole. Neither is it fully ac- 
 counted for by bearing in mind the vast difficulties which stood 
 in the way of a positive creation of a new constructive form in 
 the sixteenth century. It is a great delusion, voluntary or 
 involuntary, to treat the rubrics like passages in a law-book, and 
 to speculate constantly upon the reason for exactly choosing 
 such and such a word or formulary. No such systematic plan 
 has ever existed, either in the German Lutheran, or the English 
 reformed Liturgy ; and single words must therefore be inter- 
 preted, when the expressions are ambiguous, historically ; in 
 particular by the fundamental ideas from which the fathers of 
 the English Church started, and about which their own writings 
 leave no question of doubt. The Church imposes dogmatical 
 definitions, according to universally received principles, by 
 articles of religion, which of course must be interpreted in their 
 natural and historical sense. The Liturgy is made for devotion, 
 and not for definitions ; its aim is to reconcile and soften down 
 contending abstractions, not to introduce surreptitiously con- 
 demned principles. The rubrics are vague and contradictory. 
 Those fathers acted on one principle only, namely, that of ex- 
 cluding everything which did not harmonize with evangelical 
 consciousness, and of retaining as much of the rest as possible. 
 Here and there they unsuspectingly adopted the existing formu- 
 laries, merely because they found them. The origin of the 
 medieval service was at that time involved in obscurity. The 
 Greek Liturgy was as good as unknown. Ignorance as to the 
 idea and gradual corruption of the notion of Sacrifice in the 
 service was general. From a reconstructive work of reformation, 
 undertaken from such an imperfect point of view, a very satis- 
 factory provisional result may be obtained, and as to details 
 something permanently exemplary may arise. It cannot, how- 
 ever, be expected that the whole should be organic, and attain 
 catholic (universal) excellence. 
 
 But all this, as we have said, only accounts for the imperfec- 
 tion of the first attempt, not for the want of a definitive deve- 
 lopment. We must here consider how, at a very early period, 
 esp (i lly in Englan^l, Reformed ideas were tinged with the 
 
RESULT OF PROTESTANT AMENDMENTS. 201 
 
 feeling of opposition to everything medieval, vs^liich will account 
 for many peculiarities in the Second Book of Edward VI. 
 But, secondly (and this is the main point), we must remember 
 that a catholicizing reaction very shortly afterwards arose, in- 
 deed as early as the time of Elizabeth. This reaction was es- 
 sentially that of a hierarchical corporation, and opposed to the 
 Evangelical feeling of the people. The organic development 
 of the Liturgy is evidently repressed by the change which, in 
 consequence of the preponderance of that element, gradually 
 predominated in the whole religious consciousness of the nation, 
 as far as it was connected with the Church. The national 
 element grew eminently into an element of government ; the 
 National Church into a State Church. The Church feeling 
 remained rather a clerical concern, than became a national one ; 
 in consequence of which the laity (or the whole nation except 
 the clergy) were excluded from ecclesiastical councils and the 
 whole internal life of the Church : an exclusion which, of 
 course, reacted powerfully upon that apathy. The clergy, left to 
 itself, felt and acted naturally as a prejudiced corporation ; and, 
 by this means, the feeling of the inward religious independence 
 and liberty of the individual and of the people was weakened, 
 and in a like degree all interest in liberty of thought and the 
 love of progress. This observation bears especially upon the 
 main point, the celebration of the Communion. The conscious- 
 ness of the Christian Sacrifice necessarily manifests itself as a 
 sacerdotal one, in the medieval sense, whenever the want of ex- 
 pressing it awakens in a dominant sacerdotal corporation, and 
 not in a nation. 
 
 It appears futile to attempt to control that sacerdotal 
 tendency by the veto of the governing powers of the State. 
 Nor can the evil be remedied by the rejection of all idea of 
 sacrifice, and by reducing the service to a cold formless act of 
 the understanding. Such a dry naked worship is as far removed 
 as possible from the " reasonable service " of the Apostles, and 
 never can satisfy the religious feeling of the people for any 
 length of time, but must tend rather to generate a dangerous 
 enthusiasm or a hierarchical reaction : Methodism or Ro- 
 manism. 
 
202 INTERPRETATION AND APPLICATION. 
 
 Upon these grounds I think \\xq fact may be explained, that 
 the great movement of the sixteenth century, as it shows itself 
 (with contradictoiy defects) in the two Books of Edward VI., 
 loses, at the very outset of the spirit-killing seventeenth century, 
 all progressive vitality in England ; whereas the hierarchical 
 tendency, which endeavoured to supersede the legal and national 
 Liturgy, continues its reactionary attempts. The national 
 spirit of the English people repulsed these attempts : but the 
 forms of the national Liturgy became rigid before it had reached 
 its organic perfection. 
 
 With all this, however, it must not be forgotten, that the 
 English Church- and House-Book became and has remained at 
 once the most widely circulated, and the most practically blessed 
 book of devotion in the Christian world, and the only national 
 one. With the exception of the Quakers, all Dissenters who 
 speak the English language (even the Unitarians) retain a large 
 portion, the Methodists almost the whole, without any alter- 
 ation, of the contents of that Church-Book. The lamentable 
 notion, that the service is essentially the sermon, has, by that 
 means, been carefully guarded against by the English Church, 
 as well as the spirit of theological quibbling which darkens the 
 ancient, and the arbitrary license of the individual minister 
 which disfigures the modern, German development. It must, 
 at the same time, as a matter of justice, be admitted, that, 
 comparatively speaking, free prayer and free preaching have 
 been much discountenanced, and almost banished from the 
 service as " enthusiasm," by the exclusive fixity of English 
 ritualism. 
 
 As to the celebration of the Communion, the English rite is 
 undoubtedly in eveiy respect the most dignified and solemn. 
 It exhibits also externally the idea of the brotherhood of the 
 communicants, much more than the single successive Com- 
 munion used in most Lutheran Churches. The chancel serves 
 very appropriately as a means for uniting successively ten or 
 twenty communicants during that sacred act. 
 
 The liturgical service of the Protestant Churches on the 
 Continent has, in spite of their having retained some beautiful 
 elements, particularly in the Lutheran congregations, remained 
 
RESULT OF PROTESTANT AMENDMENTS. 203 
 
 entirely without new and renovating ideas. But the sermon, as 
 the testimony of the Spirit, hallowing and inspiring the speech 
 in the congregation, has been dignifiedly, and in some respects 
 grandly, developed. This naturally cannot be obtained without 
 power and habit of meditation ; as connected thought and medi- 
 tation, again, cannot exist without thorough fundamental theo- 
 logical study and practice. 
 
 Upon the whole, then, we must say, that the Protestant 
 Churches, from the very beginning, have nowhere succeeded in 
 exhibiting religious worship as a sacrifice ; although they have 
 to a certain degree aimed at doing so. Their service is pure in 
 its essentials, but wants an organic idea, as the centre of the 
 sacred act of the Congregation ; and, when there is no Com- 
 munion, is without any deeper basis on which a new life of 
 worship, and consequently a Church, can permanently be esta- 
 blished in the world. 
 
 Hence, also, we may now form a more just estimate of the 
 Catholicizing tendency which has unfortunately become so 
 prominent in a certain school in England, whenever attention 
 has been turned to the defects in the National Liturgy, and to 
 the older forms of Oblation. The error consists solely in this, 
 that they have capriciously apotheosized a later, and, besides, 
 demonstrably misunderstood custom, which is in contradiction 
 to the earlier one. This they would hardly have done, had 
 they not loved the killing Form more than the life-giving Idea. 
 This form, again, would not have been so unqualifiedly insisted 
 on, had it not been a question of enthroning the authority of the 
 priesthood, as such, whether from weakness of faith or out of 
 love of sacerdotal dominion. It cannot, however, escape the 
 notice of the historian, that this same hierarchical love of 
 power exists also among those who idolize the letter of the 
 present English Liturgy. The unprejudiced observer cannot 
 fail to detect here also the struggle of every caste of the priest- 
 hood to make the form administered by themselves a holy life- 
 giving thing in itself, and thereby to enhance the validity of 
 their own sacerdotal prerogatives. Such a tendency may be a 
 mark of great wisdom in a false religion. It is wholly contrary 
 to the spirit of the Gospel, and therefore not conservative. 
 
204 INTERPRETATION AND APPLICATION. 
 
 Instead of furthering, it impedes the progress of the kingdom of 
 God, which advances only by the progressive triumph of the 
 idea of the inward sacrifice of self for the brethren, out of 
 thankful love to God. The ancient Church, into whose records 
 we have searched, as well as the Gospel, cries aloud against 
 such tendencies and against their necessary consequences. 
 
05 
 
 III. 
 
 THE PRACTICAL APPLICATION. 
 
 The ancient Church may be considered as an Apostolical type 
 and model in two particulars : the Idea of the spiritual Christian 
 thank-offering, and the Ordering of Divine Service in the form 
 of a common act of the minister and congregation. The later, 
 that is, the post-Nicene, Greek Church, and the Roman Church 
 also in some points, especially in her collects, offer much 
 valuable material and many instructive hints to the investigator, 
 who, with Christian freedom, follows up the thought of worship 
 in the intervening fifteen centuries. But in so doing, the Idea 
 must always be borne in mind, and the Form be kept subordinate 
 to the Spirit. Thus the old collects were originally intended 
 to sum up, collect, the silent prayers to which the people had 
 been called ; only at a later period they became independent 
 forms. As to the collects which precede the reading of the 
 Epistle and Gospel, they were intended to refer to the contents 
 of these selections from Scripture. But indeed the Gregorian 
 collect is only an appropriate one for the festivals, as a 
 Christmas or Easter collect for instance. The Sunday Epistle 
 and Gospel have very rarely any such connexion with the 
 Sunday collect which precedes them, and the collect thus 
 becomes, to a certain degree, a mere form. The only way, 
 therefore, of at all carrying out the idea of the ancient Church 
 would be, to insert, in place of the present collect, a particular 
 Epistle collect, and a particular Gospel collect. In that case, 
 they might be both used, or the one only of them which it 
 seems desirable to make the more prominent. If, then, the 
 Roman Church, in her use of collects, though not the inventress 
 of the form (for it is borrowed from the Greek Church), be still 
 eminently distinguished as a composer, she is without the 
 element of prophetic lessons which we find preserved in the 
 
206 INTERPBETATION AND APPLICATION. 
 
 African and Galilean Churches. The idea of such lessons, by 
 the side of short passages of the Gospel history and Apostolical 
 teaching, was to show throughout the ecclesiastical year the 
 liarmony between the Old and New Testaments. The prophetic 
 lesson precedes the Epistle and Gospel both in the African 
 and Gallican Liturgies. If, therefore, we apply that idea in a 
 Scriptural sense, a selection of short passages of Scripture, one 
 for the Epistle, and one for the Gospel of the day, consisting 
 of striking passages from the books of the Prophets and verses 
 of the Psalms, would seem the most appropriate form for 
 showing the internal harmony of the spiritual elements of the 
 Old and New Testaments, and for bringing before the mind of 
 the congregation the real typical and prophetic character of the 
 Prophets and Psalms. This the later Roman Church endea- 
 voured to obtain by the verses of the Introit. It is clear that 
 Hippolytus had also some such object in view in the indication 
 of some Lessons from the Old Testament affixed to his Table 
 of Easter. 
 
 The idea is evidently excellent: but the mode in which it 
 was carried out in the ancient Church herself, we cannot vaunt 
 as a model for imitation. She endeavours generally to demon- 
 strate that harmony by bringing forward long passages of the 
 Old Testament. These, however, generally either do not really 
 apply to the object proposed, except by virtue of a wholly un- 
 tenable interpretation, or they simply contain a few words of a 
 kindred character which are lost in the context, or, at all 
 events, obscured by it. The spiritual treasures of the Prophets 
 and Psalms which really answer this purpose are very far from 
 having been exhausted by the ancient Church, and are scarcely 
 used at all by the early Protestant school, some liturgical com- 
 positions of the Book of Common Prayer excepted. What then 
 becomes of the idolatry of ancient forms? If those English 
 writers who urge the imperfect letter of the post-Nicene 
 Church proposed it as a model of Christian wisdom and taste, 
 their opinion might be very quietly discussed. But, as they 
 bring it forward as sacred authority, we must first ask to what 
 authority they refer? If to that of the primitive Church, they 
 cannot maintain their position one moment, for the forms they 
 
COLLECTS AND LESSONS. 207 
 
 idolize are unknown to that ancient Church, and very often 
 nothing but misunderstandings and wrecks of that primitive 
 age. If they appeal to the authority of the Latin Church, they 
 must first go to Rome to have a right to do so ; if to that of the 
 Church of England, they forget that this Church has, by using 
 her Christian reforming liberty, overthrown the principle of 
 idolatry both of Church authority and of ritualism. If, finally, 
 they appeal to their own authority, let them give us their 
 rensons, and enter frankly upon the ground of free discussion. 
 
 It is a very laudable feeling to appeal to Christian antiquity, 
 if it be done subserviently to Scripture and to the Spirit. But 
 whoever appeals to the forms and ordinances of the fifth and 
 sixth or subsequent centuries ought to consider, that to accept 
 a later development as a precedent implies the abandonment of 
 the earlier one, of which those forms, in most cases, are 
 manifestly a conventional modification or a corruption. As the 
 whole proceeding is arbitrary throughout and unhistorical, it 
 very often leads to assertions which honest criticism cannot 
 approve. 
 
 The attempts to bring back the English Liturgy to the 
 standard of those centuries are in every respect fraught with 
 mischief, and furnish a warning example for all times. That 
 false principle once adopted, the result of such a tendency must 
 be a total misapprehension of the evangelical element, and, 
 ultimately, a relapse to the Roman mass, whether with or with- 
 out invocation of saints is almost matter of indifference. But 
 what shall we say of the levity, presumption, and delusion, 
 implied in the pompous and empty Liturgy of the so-called 
 Irvingites ? Their founder, a pious and eloquent man, honestly 
 mistook the convulsive paroxysms of crude minds and morbid 
 persons, who during his sermons or prayers were seized by the 
 idea of the Infinite, for the Spirit of God ; and the naturally 
 incomprehensible words which accompanied them, for His secret 
 message to mankind. What originated in enthusiasm now 
 threatens to end in liturgical pomp and hierarchical pretension. 
 Instead of establishing the idea of the Christian Sacrifice, the 
 followers of Irving have plundered the Liturgies of the Greek 
 a..d other Churches, with the hands of tyros, without spirit or 
 
208 INTERPEETATION AND APPLICATION. 
 
 learning ; and the new apostles act as if their object were indeed 
 to disguise the hollowness and untenableness of then- crude 
 enthusiasm under a shallow phraseology and bombastic hierar- 
 chical forms, in order to rivet insensibly the same chains upon 
 the world which they promise to loose with the spirit. 
 
 As to the so-called Tractarians, we readily admit their merit 
 in endeavouring to infuse spirit into a languishing unspirituality ; 
 though we must frankly also admit, that they have sought the 
 ancient spirit in medieval forms, and intellectual liberty in the 
 domain of despotism. 
 
 The way of life lies exclusively in imparting new vitality and 
 free development to elements which we find already petrified 
 and disfigured in the stereotyped liturgical formularies, but 
 which are truly Apostolical and evangelical, and traceable to the 
 primitive Church, although not completely carried out in the 
 same. It is precisely because they are only suggestive and 
 symbolical, that the established formularies of the earliest age 
 are still a standing model. They consequently may not only 
 be preserved where they exist, but even freely introduced 
 wherever there is life, on the congi-egational basis. Thus alone 
 can we hope to restore to new life the genuine Christian act of 
 worship, the different stages of which they significantly point 
 out, and to revive that truly catholic feeling of our connexion 
 with the earliest age of Christianity. Beyond that much may 
 be taken from the spirit, very little from the letter, of the 
 ancient Liturgies. For the benefit of the Eastern congre- 
 gations who wish to embrace the Gospel, we may endeavour to 
 adopt their national Liturgies to practical use by expunging 
 what does not harmonize with it. But let no one deceive him- 
 self on this point ; this is at most a state of transition ; what 
 remains is more sacerdotal than popular, more formal than 
 spiritual. Those Liturgies are one-sided and defective. They 
 do not satisfy the Christian feelings of our age, and no one feels 
 the weight of antiquated forms more severely than those who 
 have sighed under them and experienced their blighting influ- 
 ence, and who know the abuse which has been made of the 
 letter in order to stifle the spirit. 
 
 As regards the Churches of the Reformation, each Church is 
 
CHURCHES OF THE EEFORMATION. 209 
 
 called upon, in the first place, to resort to the Spirit of God in 
 herself; consequently, also, to her own treasures, and to every- 
 thing which the Spirit of God has already striven to utter in 
 her language. There exist, nevertheless, in each of them 
 valuable catholic elements, to be universally received and 
 imitated by the sister Churches. In such elements, notwith- 
 standing all her defects, the English Liturgy is preeminently 
 rich, especially as regards the spirit of dignified propriety and 
 order, the spirit of nationality, and the principle of the active 
 cooperation of the people in the public worship. The co- 
 piousness of her liturgical elements is particularly adapted for 
 remedying the nakedness, scantiness, and fragmentary nature of 
 the other Protestant Liturgies, and for establishing the universal 
 idea of divine service as one of worship and adoration. The 
 German Churches, on the other hand, may be a model to the 
 English Church, in so far as they maintain the principle of the 
 free element, both as regards the prayer and the sermon. 
 " Quench not the Spirit," says the Apostle. There is a power 
 in the living outpouring of the Spirit by free prayer, and in a 
 sermon delivered out of the fulness of faith and thought, which 
 a set form and a written sermon do not possess. As regards 
 the psalmody, the mode of singing the Psalms by verses, 
 adopted from the Latin Church by mere accident, that is upon 
 no principle whatever, and the indiscriminate use of them 
 without any selection, are decidedly two great defects. For, 
 as before observed, the Psalms, when sung, cannot be con- 
 sidered as instructive and edifying passages of Scripture, but as 
 the expression of the inmost feelings of the worshipping con- 
 gregation. The rigid adhesion to the indiscriminate use of the 
 Psalter, instead of using Christian hymns, is connected with the 
 Celto-Romanic literalism and want of faith in the Spirit. It 
 originated in France ; and the Reformed Churches of Germany, 
 Holland, and Switzerland originally shared it to a certain 
 extent with the English Church, as already remarked above. 
 In like manner, the Idea of the Choir as a substitute for congre- 
 gational singing is as unapostolical as it is unspiritual. The 
 choir, where feasible, should form a connecting link between the 
 VOL. II. P 
 
210 INTERPRETATION AND APPLICATION. 
 
 clergy cand congregation, and raise the activity of the congrega- 
 tion instead of quenching or destroying it. Here, again, the 
 retrograde party have had a correct perception of the defect, 
 but (as was the natural consequence of their perverted instinct) 
 have adopted the opposite method for removing it. Instead of 
 encouraging the singing of Christian hymns, and generally 
 strengthening the organic activity of the congregation by singing, 
 they have, wherever they could, abolished it altogether, fancy- 
 ing, at the same time, that in so doing they w^ere representing 
 Christian antiquity. The living choir of the congregation is the 
 Parish School. Out of it a real choral singing may everywhere 
 be formed, that is, a choir singing in parts without any organ 
 accompaniment: not to be substituted for the singing of the con- 
 gregation, but to raise and animate it. In towns, w^herever a 
 ^ystem of instruction in singing and Church music exists, such 
 choirs may execute the most sublime compositions. 
 
 But as to the hymns themselves, it is in the domain of sacred 
 hymnology that the development of the Church since the 
 Reformation has produced a work which has a marked place in 
 universal history, and which will survive in future ages, after 
 most of the literary products of the last three centuries shall 
 have been long forgotten. In the Lutheran Church of Ger- 
 many alone, of all ancient and modern Churches, the spirit of 
 God has organically formed the great lyric epos of Christianity, 
 exhibiting the divine development of God's revelation to man 
 in the universal Christian Church. Such a historical epos can 
 indeed be composed out of the German Church hymns, and 
 only out of them. The German hymns represent the only 
 imbroken series of poetry in the German language ; and, 
 besides, together with some twenty or thirty classical hymns of 
 the ancient and medieval Latin Churches, form a grand whole 
 of sacred inspiration, composed instinctively during fifteen 
 centuries. The music to these German hymns, or the so-called 
 choral airs, is again the only example of living renewal and 
 artistic development of that ancient composition commonly 
 called the Ambrosian. The psalmody, on the other hand, or 
 Gregorian chant of the Psalms, born out of the Greek recitative, 
 has been not only retained in the English Church, but, though 
 
CHURCH ARCHITECTURE. 211 
 
 in a one-sided and not very systematic and classical manner, 
 richly developed according to the national taste of the seven- 
 teenth and eighteenth centuries. In regard to lyrical music for 
 the service, liovvever, Palasstrina remains as unapproaclied, as do 
 Sebastian Bach and Handel in the dramatic. But this dramatic 
 sacred music, of which the so-called oratorio is the spiritual ex- 
 pression, is not adapted for Church service. For this service 
 excludes musical instruments, which are an inseparable part of 
 the oratorio. The organ forms an exception, because it is 
 simply a substitute for the human voice, and ought properly only 
 to supply the want of singing in parts, and to be treated as 
 strengthening the singing of the whole congregation. For this 
 reason the interludes {Zwischenspiele) between the lines of the 
 hymns are a nuisance, which crept into the German Churches 
 in the dreary times of the seventeenth century. The power of 
 the organ, and the art of the organist, may be shown before and 
 after the service. 
 
 We must not omit this opportunity of saying a few words upon 
 Church Architecture. It is her province first to speak truth, 
 secondly to do her work in good style. She has .v.quently 
 to satisfy real wants, while she is to exhibit at the same time 
 the typical character of the Church. In such a typical, uni- 
 versal, intelligible character stands the basilica-form, deeply 
 imprinted into the European Christian life. In reference to 
 these two points, I have, therefore, no hesitation in saying, that 
 the form of the basilicas of the third and fourth centuries might 
 be applied, with slight modification, to the Evangelical service. 
 The idea of the old basilica can be equally well realized in the 
 antique style of architecture, as in the Byzuitine and Gothic: 
 only, then, let it be a correct, and not a corrupt, style. The 
 case is very different, however, with regard to the adoption of 
 the medieval cathedral architecture, as being the fundamental 
 form of the Celto-Romanic style. The medieval church may 
 either be carried out in the medieval (Byzantine or Gothic) style 
 of architecture, or in the modern Roman, like St. Peter's and 
 the churches of Palladio. But it is always calculated for a me- 
 dieval Liturgy and service. The so-called Gothic, formerly 
 termed the Germanic, but which I should prefer to call the 
 
 P 2 
 
212 INTERPKETATION AND APPLICATION. 
 
 Celto-Romanic, must consequently be created anew for the 
 restored basilicas, that is to say, must be organically adapted to 
 them. It is a beautiful alphabet, with which one may compose 
 basilicas as well as Cathedrals. Above all, however, in every 
 living restoration of ecclesiastical architecture, the untruthfulness 
 must be got rid of, which has worked its way into all modern 
 architecture, and especially into this elevated branch of it, par- 
 ticularly in the case of the churches of the Jesuits. In a true 
 restoration of church architecture, care will be taken not to pay 
 any attention to appearance and show, out of fondness for anti- 
 quity, but, at the same time, to meet evei-y real want in an artistic 
 manner, with Christian truth and honesty and Evangelical and 
 Protestant freedom. The aim will be to give one distinct cha- 
 racter to the fore part of the church (which may be called the Ser- 
 mon-church), and another to the Altar-church, the place of worship 
 and of the Communion service. These two must be kept separate, 
 and yet both be treated as parts of an organic whole. The most 
 conspicuous part of the one is the Pulpit and Reading-Desk, 
 that of the other the Communion table. The pulpit must not 
 appear as a piece of furniture, but must grow organically out of 
 the idea of the whole building. This must be the effort of 
 the genius which aims at building a place for the Church of the 
 Future, worthy of the Spirit and of Art ; but any truth is better 
 and more beautiful than all show and all untruth. 
 
 Still, how is a living Christian architecture possible, unless 
 the idea of worship, of which it ought to be the architectonic 
 form, has already found its expression spiritually in the organiz- 
 ation of the congregation, and liturgically in the form of Divine 
 service ? 
 
 In this respect, however, the defects visible in the English 
 Church are infinitely more glaring in the Churches of the Con- 
 tinent, We want a creative form for the reanimation of that 
 idea in which the whole Christian service originated. It is 
 clear, from what has been said before, that this idea can be no 
 other than the pure exhibition of the view of Christian sacrifice, 
 unfettered by any negation, or any tradition, institution, or ex- 
 ternal consideration ; such a sacrifice as is expressed clearly 
 enough in the Gospels and Epistles, and such as forms the basis 
 
CHURCH ARCHITECTURE. 213 
 
 of the whole life of worship in the ancient Church, although 
 not freely developed there. 
 
 In this restoration, the National element will have to be em- 
 bodied on one side ; the Universal or Catholic element on the 
 other. But, above all, the process must go on from the internal 
 to the external, not from the external to the internal : and the 
 only inward vital germ of future life is in the organization of 
 congregational life. 
 
 r 3 
 
214 INTERlTvETATION AND APPLICATION. 
 
 IV. 
 
 THE PICTURE AND IMPORT OF THE OTHER CEREMONIES OF THE 
 ANCIENT CHURCH. 
 
 If we turn our eyes towards the other sacred acts of the an- 
 cient Church, the ceremony which a^jpears to us as the most 
 important is that of Reception or Baptism, a picture of which 
 is given in the First Book. Of the other sacred acts we know 
 very little. 
 
 In the Marriages of the ancient Christians, the congregation 
 appeared more in its constitutional than in its devotional cha- 
 racter. The marriage was ari-anged with the consent of the 
 Church, according to the law of the Land. If the couple were 
 both Christians, they probably received the bishop's or elder's 
 benediction at the Lord's table. Holy, however, and awful (as 
 a mystery, or sacrament) was Marriage itself, not its liturgical 
 solemnization. 
 
 As regards the Burial of the Dead, the emperor Julian men- 
 tions it expressly, as exemplary and commendable from its 
 dignity and solemnity. Fixed liturgical forms for it, however, 
 did not exist. But the allusions of St. Chrysostom to the 
 psalms used on that occasion, the description left us by Augustin 
 of the funeral ceremonies of his pious mother, and a few hymns 
 of the same century of the Church, show that the inexhaustible 
 Psalm-book, partly perhaps in conformity with Jewish prece- 
 dents, was made use of at those funerals, in the sense of faith and 
 hope. Even at the present day, in the Eastern as well as 
 Western Church, the unadulterated Gregorian chant, with a 
 dignified slow execution, is the most ancient, as well as, for 
 those who understand what is sung, most affecting, part of the 
 ritual. No rational doubt can be entertained that the con- 
 gregation made mention of their deceased brethren at the cele- 
 bration of the Lord's Supper, as early as the third century. 
 
MODERN ORDINANCES. 215 
 
 We have already explained, in our picture of Divine service, 
 the order in which the Prayers w^ere arranged at this solemnity. 
 The custom of Funeral Feasts, as will be shown in the Fourth 
 Book, was borrowed from the heathen : but these were rendered 
 orderly and pure, and the wealthy used them as opportunities 
 for performing acts of charity, by making large contributions to 
 their poorer brethren. 
 
 Among modern ordinances, the English Funeral Service is a 
 model of dignity and solemnity, and beautiful in its choice of 
 the psalms. The German Lutheran Service, however, has its 
 own noble elements of spiritual poetry, in common with the 
 most ancient Church. In the Marriage Ceremony both are 
 exemplary ; but here, again, by the side of the truly grand 
 national work of the English Liturgy, the Liturgies of distracted 
 Germany show only classical elements clumsily put together ; the 
 natural consequence of provincial dismemberment. 
 
 p 4 
 
BOOK IV. 
 
 THE EULES OF CHRISTIAN LIFE IN THE CONGRE- 
 GATIONAL, SOCIAL, AND DO^IESTIC RELATIONS. 
 
 Under this title we have collected every particular furnished by 
 the genuine texts as to the general life of Christians. It is not 
 our intention to discuss the details here. Such of them as re- 
 quired explanation have already been examined sufficiently for 
 our purpose in the preceding pages. The only point which 
 concerns us here, moreover, is their import for universal history 
 and this we shall best bring under the notice of our readers, by 
 referring the most important definitions to the general point of 
 view of philosophical history. 
 
 Congregational life was, in the eyes of the early Christians, 
 not so much the connecting link between domestic and public 
 life, as it was essentially the extended domestic, and the only 
 public life which was valuable or accessible to the Christian. 
 The members of the Church were brothers and sisters to each 
 other. The Church itself was a free commonwealth, and, in 
 very early times, felt that it was the organic member of a vast 
 commonwealth destined to embrace the world. Every thing 
 which lay beyond this luminous point was dark, hostile, and 
 doomed to destruction, as being "this world," that is, the 
 political order of the Roman empire, which was destined to 
 perish, as well as the national existence of the Jews. 
 
 The Christian life was based upon Christian customs. If 
 the domestic customs were respectable, the congregational were 
 holy ; for they constituted the separation between light and 
 darknccs, faith and unbelief, holiness and ungodliness. To 
 these customs belonged, first of all, the practice of Fasting, 
 
218 INTERPRETATION AND APPLICATION. 
 
 which was connected with Divine service ; and the observation 
 of Sunday as the Lord's day, with or without that of the 
 Saturday as Sabbath: the frequent, and in some Churches daily 
 partaking of the Communion : and the rule for the admission of 
 foreign elders to oiFer the benediction before the Holy Supper. 
 
 The fasting which was commanded by Christ was a private 
 abstinence from food, for the purpose of producing tranquillity 
 of mind. Thus in our genuine collections there does not exist 
 a single ordinance which enters into this private life of the indi- 
 vidual. It was only in Passion week, when the congregation 
 regularly assembled every day, and with pious thoughts turned 
 into their own bosoms, bewailing the sins which had betrayed 
 the Lord and crucified Him, that a common fast was observed 
 as a congregational ordinance. The death of Christ occupied 
 their minds, especially on the day of our Lord's betrayal, the 
 Wednesday, and the day of His crucifixion, Friday. Now, as 
 the children of the family refrain from the social joyous family 
 meal when their father is taken away from them, so did the 
 Church on those days in that week, but still with a rational 
 liberty according to circumstances. This alone suffices to show 
 that the fasting of the Holy week was not an unqualified absti- 
 nence from food, but a common ordinance for limiting them to 
 bread and unsavoury dishes (xerophagy). In this sense, it is 
 true that in the age before us, in occasional instances, a forty 
 days' fast was kept as a pious custom, in reference to the forty 
 days' fasting of Jesus in the Wilderness, and commonly the 
 weekly fasts on Wednesday and Friday. But the Alexandrian 
 Collections show that the origin of this custom of fasting and of 
 the ordinance had reference to Passion week, and that care was 
 taken to trace it back to the institutions of the Apostles. 
 
 The celebration of the day of our Lord's Resurrection was 
 already more solemnly observed than the Jewish Sabbath, con- 
 sidered as the eve of the great solemnity. We nowhere, how- 
 ever, find a trace of that relapse into Jewish ceremonial, the 
 unchristian interruption of congregational Church and social 
 life, which some persons in the English and Scotch Churches, 
 amiable in other respects, maintain to be a divine institution 
 binding upon all Christians ; and who are not contented with 
 
FASTING IN THE ANCIENT CUUKCH. 219 
 
 defending a wise and free popular custom, which may be, within 
 certain limits, a necessary correctio for many people, as Chris- 
 tian and moral in the idea. It is consolatory to see that a man 
 so strongly attached to positive Church doctrines, and so earnest 
 as Hengstenberg, has voluntarily come forward to oppose the 
 abuse of this custom, in a little work of his which has lately ap- 
 peared, containing thoroughly sound principles upon the obser- 
 vation of Sunday. Judaism remains Judaism, and is both foreign 
 and in opposition to the Gospel. 
 
 The Love-feasts (Church- and House-book, p. 60. sqq.) were 
 the connecting link between the congregational life of the 
 Church and her social life. It was the hallowing of the Syssitiae, 
 or common meals of the ancient world, which, as a remnant of 
 the old Germanic custom, holds, even to the present day, so 
 important a place in England and the United States. In pri- 
 mitive times, the object was nothing less than an assemblage of 
 persons, especially at the common meals, for the purpose of 
 purifying themselves from all idolatrous customs, as well as from 
 all immorality and irregularities, which had eaten, like a canker, 
 into the whole framework of society in the latter ages of the 
 decline and fall of Greece and Rome. Thus, long after they 
 had ceased to be connected with the Church celebration of the 
 Lord's Supper, these Love-feasts of the early Christians were 
 instituted and perpetuated ; brotherly meals which still partially 
 take place in the Churches, and from which the bishop should 
 never have absented himself, because the feeling of the original 
 association in a social religious meal has still survived. Now it 
 was by these that the purification of common life was prepared 
 against the time when God should renew the world, that is to 
 say, should will to send a new fresh natural element, a people 
 endued with strong vital powers, for the complete constitutional 
 development of the germ implanted in families and Churches 
 which were rescued from destruction. 
 
 Such is the historical import of the custom here alluded 
 to, relative to the Love-feasts or Agapae of the primitive Chris- 
 tians. 
 
 Now their entire common life, the congregational Church and 
 Bocial life, rested on the Christian reform of domestic life, with 
 
220 INTEIiPRETATIOX AND APPLICATIOX. 
 
 which we have also connected all the other rules and maxims 
 which affect individual Christians. Many of these exhibit the 
 character of the ancient world, which was possessed by a dread 
 of demons, and, under an anxious apprehension of the influence 
 of charms, sought for external preservatives against the powers 
 of Evil, and accompanied tlieir prayers with external signs and 
 gestures. The point to be especially noticed here is, that our 
 ordinance (p. 66. supra) expressly says that the important thing 
 is for the believers to know that the sign is only a sign, and the 
 heart and faith the main point, the real preservative. 
 
 The Remembrance of the Dead forms a part of the duties of 
 domestic as well as common life. Both Jewish and heathen 
 custom tended to support the general feeling of humanity. The 
 Service for the Dead, the pious care for the departed, repre- 
 sented by prayers, sacrifices, and remembrances, was more 
 deeply rooted in the religion of the old Greeks and Romans 
 than any other of its ordinances, and in the ancient Christian 
 service survived the fall of heathenism. Precisely in the same 
 manner, among the Chinese, there is scarcely any other living 
 remain of old faith and old nationality existing, except this 
 custom of pious superstition. 
 
 I have sufficiently pointed out, in the preceding Book, what 
 was the Apostolical ground, and what was the obscure point of 
 this custom in the primitive Church. 
 
 At the very end of the Church- and House-Book (p. 70. supra) 
 is given one of the two injunctions of the Church of Jerusalem, 
 by which the Apostles connected that Christian community with 
 the Gentile Christians in Antioch : namely, the command to 
 abstain from eating the Sacrificial Meats. This command, and 
 that against Fornication, were the two starting-points and fun- 
 damental pillars of Christian Church discipline, or congregational 
 order. The first abolished the worship of idols, which was in- 
 separably connected with all the art and civilization of antiquity, 
 as well as with the whole political life of heathenism. It con- 
 tained a testimony against idolatry which the existing tyrants 
 of the world could not effectually gainsay. It was the first 
 declaration of war by the spirit of freedom and human dignity, 
 which was driven back into the inward recesses of the con- 
 
ABSTINENCE FROM SACRIFICIAL MEAT. 221 
 
 science. It accordingly also, for that very reason, led to a 
 collision with the powers of this world, and made Christians 
 detested by the Greeks and Romans, still more than Jews, 
 because they were, for the most part, brethren and children of 
 their own nationality, not sons of the exclusive Jewish nation, 
 who kept themselves aloof in hostile isolation. But it was 
 in refei-ence to this war, that our Lord uttered those sublime 
 words so historically important (Luke, xii. 49.), shortly after 
 he entered upon his office of teacher: "Fire I am come to 
 throw on the earth ; and how do I desire it was already kindled ! " 
 The first command cast the Divine firebrand into that old world 
 which was doomed to destruction. The second penetrated still 
 deeper into the heart of heathenism, and even of the then 
 existing Judaism ; and it requires the child-like innocence of 
 Neander, to comprehend how that historian should have ex- 
 pressed his wonder that it could have been necessary to issue 
 such a command, on such a subject, for the first time, to men 
 embracing Christianity. 
 
 With this second command is connected a point noticed in 
 a remarkable passage of the Greek text of the Constitutions 
 (p. 72. supra), in regard to domestic life, the relative position 
 of master and servant, and the matrimonial relations. 
 
 We would, first of all, remark, commencing with the first, 
 that the relation between master and slave not only expresses 
 that of a master of a house and his servant, but also that of an 
 employer and his workman : for in those times all manufactur- 
 ing operations were performed by slaves. We have, on that 
 account, already made some remarks, among our observations 
 upon the Catechumens, as to the social importance of the 
 claims that Christianity, which was to reform the world from 
 within and from below, made upon its followers. Our Apo- 
 stolical ordinance prescribes that the Christian master shall 
 not make his slaves work more than five days in the week. 
 The Saturday and Sunday were to be appropriated to theii- 
 instruction in religious duties. This essentially includes the 
 whole question of the present day, as to giving workmen in 
 manufactories school education and an opportunity of attend- 
 ing the Church service. In Passion and Easter weeks, more- 
 
222 INTERPRETATION AND APPLICATION. 
 
 over, it was enjoined that no work should be done, in order 
 that they might have more especial instruction in Christianity. 
 
 What an attack upon the kingdom of insatiable Mammon! 
 What arrogance on the part of a few miserable outcasts, vaga- 
 bond Jews and their adherents among the lower classes of 
 Roman society ! We can thus easily comprehend the hatred 
 of the whole world, of which Tacitus speaks; and the injunc- 
 tion mentioned in the Apocalypse as given by the persecuting 
 Jews and heathens, not to buy anything of Christians, and to 
 exclude them as much as possible, as enemies of the gods and 
 of men, from all intercourse of social life. But still, at all 
 events, it was a heathen state and a heathen society, which was 
 leagued with Rabbinism to proscribe and persecute the prin- 
 ciple of Christianity. If, now, that proud mistress of the 
 world and her people perished for their resistance to the 
 religion of the Spirit and of freedom, how can existing govern- 
 ments and nations which confess Christ with their lips but 
 serve Mammon, and are in bondage to the most selfish gratifi- 
 cations, just as if there were no other world but this and its 
 treasures, how can they, I say, escape from the like destruction? 
 And oh the blind prophets and theologians ! who interpret the 
 signs of the Apocalypse, and explain as prophetic of our days 
 what had reference to the fall of Jerusalem and of Rome, and 
 yet are struck with such blindness as to the signs of their own 
 times ! Oh the fools ! who, if they do see the imminent perils 
 of this age, think to ward them off by narrow-minded per- 
 secution of such as differ from them in opinion, and by main- 
 taining external forms and hypocritical customs! But they are 
 as utterly incompetent really to divine the signs of that mo- 
 mentous past, as they are to interpret those of the present time. 
 They are waiting (like the Jews) for the consummation of that 
 which has been long ago accomplished, and misunderstand not 
 only the Apocalypse, but the words of the Gospel also. They 
 cannot comprehend the universal judgment of history which lies 
 before their eyes ; all which preaches the same truth, only in 
 still stronger and clearer language than^ the veiled visions in 
 that book. The forecast of the Apostles, and the prophecies 
 of the Apocalypse, are fulfilled ; and the words of Christ are 
 
MARRIAGE. 223 
 
 verified to the letter. The generation of the Apostles did not 
 pass away until Jerusalem had fallen, and the axe was laid at 
 the roots of Rome, and, in fact, hy Christianity itself. This 
 was not done by superhuman force, nor, again, by natural force, 
 but by spiritual fii*e ; that consuming Divine fire which is in- 
 herent in the doctrine of Christ. 
 
 The mighty lever which put in operation the religious and 
 moral influences which have renewed the world lay in the most 
 holy relation of mankind, in marriage. Christianity found con- 
 cubinage recognized by law, the legitimate established form 
 under which the two sexes lived together. Divorces, however, 
 were frequent, even among the Jews themselves. The legis- 
 lation of Julius Caesar and Augustus, for restoring the dignity 
 of the ancient Roman marriage, proved, like all external re- 
 forms in the spiritual domain, utterly ineffectual. The main 
 points in the law of a marriage enacted by the Apostles were 
 nothing but the honest conclusions drawn by believers from the 
 words of Christ. We might condense them into the following 
 canons : 
 
 " The husband owes to the wife the same constancy which she owes to 
 him : 'Let the marriage-bed be undefiled,' says the author of the 
 Epistle to the Hebrews. 
 
 " Married couples form a unity of person, like the unity of the 
 Lord with His Church : the husband, consequently, cannot give 
 his wife a bill of divorcement, except for the cause of adultery, 
 that is, on account of infidelity. For adultery, as a betrayal of 
 the privilege of maternity which has been confided to her, is, as 
 it were, her civil death, and dissolves the partnership for life, as 
 does natural death. 
 
 *' The wife, however, cannot separate herself from her husband on 
 account of his infidelity, so as to be fi'ee from the bond of wedlock. 
 
 "To marry a woman divorced for anything but her own infidelity, in 
 the lifetime of her husband, is adultery : for the repudiated wife 
 ought to wait for reconciliation ; she is bound so long as her 
 husband lives." 
 
 As regards the forbidden degrees of consanguinity and affinity, 
 the Christians evidently observed in primitive times the in- 
 junctions of the Law. The 19th Apostolic canon forbids an 
 
224 INTERPRETATION AND APPLICATION. 
 
 ecclesiastic to marry his sister-in-law, his uncle's daughter, or 
 his niece (as being the first degree of consanguinity), just as it 
 forbids him to contract a second marriage, or to espouse a di- 
 vorced woman, a concubine, or an unchaste person. This, con- 
 sequently, was an enactment against something of ordinary 
 occurrence in common Christian life, although the person so 
 marrying was blamed. 
 
 The Christian woman herself, however, was looked upon in a 
 very different light to the Jewess and the heathen. She was 
 honoured as a co-heiress of the kingdom of heaven, as sharing 
 the same responsibilities and the same hopes. And the woman 
 made ample return to Christianity for what Christianity did for 
 her. In the higher as well as the lower classes, it was woman 
 who made most of the converts to the religion of uTankind, and, 
 during persecutions, displayed the courage of the hero with the 
 discipline of the virgin. 
 
 We have reached here the inmost centre of the spiritual 
 power of Christianity, the feeling of moral responsibility, of the 
 spiritual independence of all its members, poor and rich, edu- 
 cated and uneducated, men and women, young men and maidens. 
 This feeling of moral responsibility rests, however, essentially 
 upon faith in the divine power and the godlike strength of man, 
 in the moral liberty to combat the selfish desires of his senses 
 and passions, and to act according to the voice of conscience, as 
 the voice of God in him. 
 
 And we now call upon every observer of history and of the 
 present times, conscientiously to inquire whether this funda- 
 mental power of Christianity is more general in the great mass 
 of the population, in countries wheie the Reformation has been 
 adopted, or in those which have remained under the dominion 
 of Rome: and again, whether it is stronger in those Catholic 
 countries which have not been affected at all by the Reformation, 
 or in those which have experienced its influence, even though it 
 be only on account of their immediate vicinity to Protestantism. 
 The answer of one and all is written with letters of fire (and 
 with a back-ground of blood) on the leaves of the history of the 
 world. 
 
 Tlie second question, however, we address to those who, in 
 
FEELING OF llESPONSIBILITY. 225 
 
 England or Germany, say, or who follow those who say, that 
 the misery of our times, and the decline of Christianity, can be 
 remedied by calling upon individuals and nations simply to do 
 what the Clergy has ordered, or is ordering, or will order, for 
 them, under promise of salvation if they obey, and under pain 
 of damnation if they do not ; in short, by the restoration of that 
 sacerdotal power over the consciences and religious convictions 
 of men which their fathers rejected in faith, as unchristian, by 
 a solemn declaration and protest. 
 
 It would be presumptuous to suppose that any person whose 
 blindness on these points cannot be removed by the Gospel, 
 and by the history of the Reformation of the sixteenth century, 
 and of the bloody struggle against it on the part of the Catholic 
 dynasties and the priesthood, will have his eyes opened by the 
 picture of the ancient Church. But, at all events, this picture 
 condemns them when they appeal to that primitive Church ; a 
 great and glorious time, although not free from the defects of a 
 sinking age. Almost all the lies and frauds in history, law, 
 constitution, and doctrine have gradually been given up step by 
 step, from the Decretals down to the Pseudo-Dionysius, not 
 from goodwill, but from the mere impossibility of maintaining 
 the discussion. The few remaining isolated props of the system, 
 upon which honest investigators might formerly differ in opinion, 
 give way more and more every day. 
 
 The age is at this moment in the birth-throe ; whether for 
 destruction or conservation is uncertain, but assuredly not for 
 the permanent establishment of a power of falsehood and 
 oppression, and assuredly as little for the foundation of a 
 pretorian imperialism in the heart of civilized Europe, as of a 
 lying Jesuitism, its ally. 
 
 On the other hand, however, it must not be disguised, that 
 the one-sidedness of the ancient Church, and the infinitely 
 greater of the middle ages, cannot be abolished or avoided, 
 unless the whole European life be reformed upon Christian and 
 Evangelical principles ; common social life as well as worship, 
 political life as well as ecclesiastical. The ancient Church sunk 
 into ritualism, because social and political life was extinct. 
 The middle ages could not recover the equilibrium, because 
 
 VOL. II. Q 
 
22(5 INTERPRETATION AND APPLICATION. 
 
 that ritualism had made a clerical congregation the mistress of 
 the world. The highest realization of the idea of religion, of 
 the sacrifice of self, consists in carrying out in the life the vow 
 made in the act of worship. There is no distinction of works, 
 no good works for the Church : the divinely high or good work 
 is life in faith, the fulfilment of the high or humble vocation 
 which every one may have assigned him, whether it be the 
 prince's or the philosopher's, the clergyman's or the shoemaker's, 
 according to the legend of St. Antony, so highly prized by 
 Luther. But as the realization of the Christian principle is 
 more completely carried out in married than in single life, in the 
 congregation more than in the domestic circle ; so is its realiz- 
 ation in the people, as a nation, by means of a State constituted 
 on Christian principles, and consequently free by sovereign law, 
 the highest aim of Christianity. The noblest minds and people 
 are now striving to bring about this sovereignty of the law, which 
 is the divine right of every human sovereignty. The victory 
 is certain, if people and governments will meet one another as in 
 the presence of Christ, to whom tliey both appeal. Christ is to 
 become People, as eighteen centuries ago He became Man ; for 
 it is only through Peoples and States enjoying Christian freedom 
 that He can become Mankind. But nations must, out of love 
 to God, individually sacrifice self for the community, if govern- 
 ments are to make the greatest of all sacrifices, that of dictatorial 
 power. 
 
LAW-BOOK or ANTE-NICENE CHUKCH. 227 
 
 The Law-Book of the Ante-Nicene Church. 
 
 When the position of the clergy developed itself as a special 
 one, but still within the congregation, certain legislative institu- 
 tions became necessary, for maintaining discipline and order in 
 this corporation. Such was the origin of the " Definitions," or 
 declarations of spiritual law, of which Hippolytus speaks. The 
 most ancient collection of these " Definitions " contains about 
 thirty, which were embodied in the second century by some one 
 well acquainted with the subject, into a summary of what was 
 considered, in the consciousness of the Church, as sanctioned by 
 custom immemorial. This first Collection consisted of three 
 chapters.* 
 
 Total. 
 I. On Ordination : Canons i. ii. - - - - 2 
 II. On the Oblation and Communion : in— v. viii. 
 
 XII. - - 8 
 
 III. On Acts which deprive of official Rights or 
 
 Offices : xiu — xxiv. xxv. xxvi. xxvui. xxxiv. 20 
 
 Sum total, 30 canons. 
 
 To these were appended, but at an early date : 
 
 IV. On the rights and duties of the Bishop : xxx 
 
 XLI. 7 
 
 and subsequently, when the collection thus extended 
 had been formed : 
 V. Other Grounds of Deprivation: XLii—Lxv. - 5 
 
 Complete genuine Collection, 42 canons. 
 
 * See Table of Contents of the Law-Book, p. 76. sqq., to be compared 
 with the Essays on the Constitutions and on the Canons. Upon the canon 
 (xxxv.) about the metropolitan system, see above, y). 133. As to the ancient 
 canons concerning the marriage of the clergy (xvii — xix.), compared with 
 the later interpolations (vi. xxvii. xlvii.), see p. 137., and what has been 
 said about Hippolytus himself on this subject. 
 
 Q 2 
 
228 INTERPRETATION AND APrLICATION. 
 
 Thus far the criticism of this collection brings us by internal 
 evidence. But the Collection of the Church of Alexandria, 
 which has come down to us, authentically proves that the canons 
 from xLVii. to l. were added afterwards. As an interpolation 
 was made into the earliest collections of the Thirty Definitions, 
 so was an ordinance upon the marriage of the clergy (xlviii.) 
 inserted into the extended collection, and doubtless in the third 
 or the first years of the fourth century. 
 
 Thus, therefore, the collection, when critically examined 
 upon the history of the marriage of the clergy, authenticates 
 the gradual establishment of a varying particular law for them 
 by the very fact of the later custom being inserted into the 
 collection which was already held as authority by the Church. 
 
 The Second Collection, which is not recognized by the Roman 
 Church, bears already a more decided character of a Law-Book 
 for the internal discipline of the clergy, with penal enactments. 
 It contains three " Definitions " which are evidently post-Ni- 
 ccne : canon lxxxi. manifestly a repetition and confirmation of 
 a former one (in the First Collection, can. xx. comp. with 
 xxxi.); and canons lxxxiii, and lxxxiv. which are inseparable, 
 and neither of which harmonizes with what precedes. It is 
 obvious that the appended canon of Scripture is spurious from 
 the very fact of its contradicting, in many points, the authentic 
 traditions and assumptions of the early Church. Moreover, it 
 is wanting in the oldest MS. of the present text, the celebrated 
 Codex Barberinus.* 
 
 We have to establish three especial points for our survey of 
 universal history. 
 
 First : that this primitive Ecclesiastical Law is the earliest law 
 of a really free corporation, formed at the period of the decay 
 of all the others. 
 
 Secondly : that this law was essentially a congregational law, 
 and implies the legislative cooperation of the Christian people, 
 as well as do the first legal definitions of the Church of 
 Jerusalem. 
 
 Thirdly: that the judicial proceeding connected with it (upon 
 
 * See Appendix on the text of the Apostolical Canons. 
 
LAW-BOOK OF ANTE-NICENE CHURCn. 229 
 
 wliicli some regulations occur in tlie second section of the Text- 
 Book) contains many of the germs of the Christian criminal 
 trial, as they have been subsequently worked out by English 
 legislation. The rack came to the canonical process from the 
 civil legislation : but the only Christian method of discovering 
 truth, even without such a spiritual rack as the compulsory 
 confession of the inquisitorial process, namely, the examination 
 and cross- examination of witnesses, originated in the Canon 
 Law. 
 
 As regards the new Canon Law it begins with the Decretals, 
 which were forged by the Latin priests and sanctioned by the 
 popes, and closes with the canons of James L of the year 1604, 
 which are foreign to the Common Law of England to this day, 
 from their never having received the sanction of Parliament. 
 They appear, moreover, as far as the known records go, to be 
 only the resolutions of the province of Canterbury. The con- 
 necting links of this Canon Law with the Ecclesiastical Law of 
 the age of Hippolytus are : first, misunderstandings and abuses ; 
 secondly, fraud and forgeries ; thirdly, the sanction by that 
 same absolute power which raised its throne upon those mis- 
 understandings, abuses, and forgeries. There exists, most cer- 
 tainly, a historical connexion between the two, but it is highly 
 illegitimate and shameful. The Canon Law of the Roman 
 Church has, historically, been based upon the principles and 
 usages recorded by our so-called Apostolical Canons ; but in 
 spirit and substance it is in contradiction to the constitution, 
 principles, and practice of the ancient Church, from one end to 
 the other. Its practical cement with the genuine ancient Eccle- 
 siastical Law is blood. Its very life is based upon the death of 
 the legitimate power of the congregation, and the denial of the 
 supreme sovereignty of the whole visible Church, which is, as 
 Hooker says in his seventh book, " the true original subject of 
 all power." What distinguished the power of one bishop from 
 that of another, in the ecclesiastical sense, was the circumstance 
 of his being assisted by a council of elders, whereas his colleague 
 in the next village was not. As to the Anglo-Saxon Canons, 
 they are much stronger evidence of the rights of the laity, than 
 those of the Romanizing and imperialized Franks. The canons 
 
 Q3 
 
230 INTERPRETATION AND APPLICATION. 
 
 of 750 and 970 are very strong upon that point, as has been shown 
 by the present bishop of Oxford in his highly instructive work 
 on the Episcopal Church of the United States ; and lately by the 
 Rev. William Goode, in his Defence of the expressions used by 
 the present venerable Primate of the Church of England respect- 
 ing the validity of non-episcopal ordinations, against certain 
 attacks and anathemas which betray as little learning as charity. 
 The author of that Defence shows that not only the two living 
 historians of the English Constitution, Hallam and Macaulay, 
 but also the great Bacon, and the most eminent defenders of 
 episcopacy in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, protest 
 against such a doctrine, which, indeed, was not held by Laud 
 himself. 
 
 The point at issue with the Anomians is, that Church 
 government exists by divine right; with the Judaizers, that the 
 supreme legislative authority of the Church is in the Christian 
 people. Divine unselfish love, which has founded both World 
 and Church, can alone regenerate and reform them. 
 
231 
 
 RETROSPECTIVE VIEW. 
 
 THE REGENERATION OF THE WORLD IN PROTESTANT STATES. THE 
 
 LAW OF DIVORCE AND THE LAW OP SLAVERY. 
 
 Let US cast one retrospective glance over our picture ! The 
 hidden germs of life have been developed into a new world, 
 which in our day is growing into colossal proportions, with a 
 full consciousness on the part of mankind that their choice lies 
 between the awful alternatives of death and regeneration. 
 
 The great work of Christianity is before us. It is not a hier- 
 archy with her rich rituals and her ritualistic art and con- 
 ventional science ; its miracle is the real world in which we 
 live. It is the individual, standing before his God with his 
 Bible and his self-responsible conscience, whether man or 
 woman, layman or clerk. It is the Christian household 
 founded on mutual trust. It is the congregation with its own 
 shepherd and his pattern household. It is the Christian 
 municipality, controuling itself by the self-government and 
 mutual confidence which exist in its members. It is the 
 Christian nation and state, with her national schools based upon 
 the Gospel of the persecuted Church ; with her universities 
 expanding in the Christian philosophy founded by the martyrs ; 
 with her national hospitals grown out of the nurseries of the 
 deaconesses of old ; and with her Poor-Law, consecrating 
 Christian support as a national debt ; finally, with her sove- 
 reignty of law, and with her religious and civil liberty, advanc- 
 ing by reform and not by revolution. 
 
 Where that work and that faith in its divine power live, 
 there is Apostolicity, and there is the future of the world, for 
 there is Christ. 
 
 All Christian tribes and nations, if we compare them with 
 the rest of mankind, are, in a larger sense, the monument ot 
 this regenerating process. This work of regeneration is visible 
 in the history of the nations of the Eastern Church, in spite 
 
 <i4 
 
232 INTEKPRETATION AND APPLICATION. 
 
 of her early stereotyped ritualism and of the Imperial abso- 
 lutism and Muhammedan despotism of her rulers. It is in 
 some respects still more perceptible in the history of the 
 nations of the Latin Church, in spite of the systematic 
 tyranny of Rome, and in spite of a conventional mediaeval 
 dogmatism. But the Reformation marks so strongly the com- 
 mencement of a new regenerative process, that in some re- 
 spects it surpasses the effects of the first outpouring of the 
 Spirit of God over mankind, in the very beginning of Apostolic 
 Christianity. Whatever oscillations have taken place, and are 
 taking place, in isolated individuals, no Protestant nation 
 has ever voluntarily returned to Catholicism; no one parish, 
 or part of one, has abandoned the standard of the Gospel, in 
 order to return to priestly rule : wliereas, in spite of persecution, 
 and all the machinery of the combined absolute power of 
 prince and priest, wherever a religious spirit pervades the age 
 and penetrates the masses, we see whole communities come 
 over to the Gospel, and, regardless of persecutions, show them- 
 selves ready to sacrifice all for a faith connected with their indi- 
 vidual conscience. The Protestant missions have created, out of 
 the corrupted savages of Tahiti, a Christian self-governing people, 
 in whom neither bayonets, nor brandy, nor any similar means of 
 conversion, have been able to destroy the germ of independent 
 spiritual life. Compare this with the great monument of Jesuit 
 missions, the much-extolled Paraguay, where docile machines 
 were formed, unable to march without leading-strings, and ready 
 to become the easy prey of the first adventurer who undertook to 
 tyrannize over them instead. And what has been the i*esult, as 
 to the Chinese nation, of all the efibrts and intrigues of the 
 Jesuits at the Tatar court of Pekin ? which of the elements set at 
 work there has kindled new life among the most ancient civilized 
 nation of the world ? The present Protestant movement may 
 miscarry, but a moral reform founded upon faith never perishes. 
 Will the Protestant villages perish which have in Tinevelly 
 formed themselves into well organized parishes, sometimes with 
 the Brahmin among them ? And what have we observed at the 
 sources of the Jordan in Hasbeya ? what do we now see, to our 
 astonishment, occurring throughout Syria and Mesopotamia ? 
 
RETROSPECTIVE VIEW. 233 
 
 But why do I speak of distant missions and countries ! Have 
 not more than seventy congregations been formed in France, since 
 the Restoration, out of Roman Catholic parishes ? Who does 
 not know that whole nations would fly to the Gospel, if the 
 bayonets did not prevent them? These observations will suffice 
 to show where the principle of life is at work in our age, and 
 what are the real signs of the times. But what is this pi'ogres- 
 sive and regenerative process now going on throughout modern 
 Europe, on both sides of the great ocean, but the work of the 
 Reformation ? Its rejection has crushed, and lamed, and is con- 
 vulsing continually the most richly gifted, once the freest and 
 most powerful nation of the world ; whereas those who have 
 received the faith of the Gospel have grown from nameless 
 provinces and tribes into nations, from small and second-rate 
 powers into world-ruling states, merely by the regenerative moral 
 element which is in them. It may be said on the whole, as the 
 result of the events of the first three centuries of the Reform- 
 ation, that in dynasties, as well as in nations, the regenerating and 
 conservative element has been the Protestant principle, and that 
 the renovating and reconstructive Spirit of God is now, as a 
 national principle of action, only visibly at work in Protestant 
 nations and states, and almost invariably in proportion as the 
 reforming principle of the sixteenth century has been carried 
 out faithfully and in the spirit of the Gospel, through all 
 branches of social and political life. 
 
 If the history of the world from 1517 to 1815 has taught 
 this great truth to all those who faithfully inquire and try to 
 understand the spirit of the times, the forty years of peace 
 which have since elapsed must have opened the eyes even of 
 the blind. What noble efforts were made by wise and virtuous 
 and patriotic men, to establish religious and civil liberty ! And 
 why have they failed ? Because civil and- religious liberty is 
 not the fruit of godless civilization but of moral reformation. 
 They have failed in Roman Catholic countries, because the bigotry 
 of an anti-national or at least extra-national clergy, the ignorance 
 of the lower classes who only understand by religion a system 
 of observances, and finally a decided unbelief, if not in Chris- 
 tianity, at least in moral self-responsibility, among the inhabi- 
 
234 INTERPRETATION AND APPLICATION. 
 
 tants of the towns and the higher classes, are not elements of 
 liberty but of despotism. These are the reasons why even the 
 sincerest attempts to introduce real reforms into society and 
 government have been frustrated. The deluge of 1848 was 
 almost universal ; its waves beat even up to the shores of Great 
 Britain : but, if we look to the great masses, which are the states 
 and nations that have emerged and are emerging from it ? which 
 are those still submerged and more grievously oppressed than 
 before ? Is it those conducted on the Protestant principle, or 
 those led by the clerical power ? What is become of the Hymn 
 of Pio Nono ? what of his reforms ? Reform is the watchword 
 when the hour of danger is at hand ; but where is reform possible 
 except where liberty exists ? where is liberty possible except 
 where there is self-government? where is there self-govern- 
 ment without mutual confidence ? where mutual confidence, 
 except where there is self-control in the individual? and how 
 can self-control become the national principle, the principle of 
 action among the people, where religion is not identified with 
 morality, and religious belief with the free moral conviction of 
 its truth and of its identity with conscience and reason ? The 
 success of Belgium and the hopes of Sardinia rest upon the Pro- 
 testant principle of not leaning upon the hierarchy as the means 
 of government. 
 
 There are, however, two dark spots in this social picture : 
 the Law of Divorce in some of the Protestant States of 
 Europe, and the Law of Slavery in the United States. I shall 
 oflfer upon both some brief remarks, which a retrospective glance 
 over the picture of Church life will amply confirm. 
 
 The Law of Divorce is part of the Law of Marriage, and ought, 
 in Christian states, to be in unison with Christian principles. 
 We have seen what these principles were in early Christianity : 
 the Gospel and the Epistles show what they ought to be. The 
 Latin Church, seduced by St. Augustine's sentimentality and 
 utter want of common sense in points of law, has cut the knot 
 by prohibiting divorce altogether, although such a prohibition 
 is in glaring contradiction with the clear precept of Christ, with 
 
THE LAW OF DIVORCE. 235 
 
 the doctrine of the Apostles, and with the discipline and practice 
 of the ancient Church. The consequence of this unhelieving 
 discipline has been, that in exclusively Roman Catholic states 
 marriage has become to be considered as divorce. If you 
 will make the marriage tie independent of its moral basis, the 
 sanctity of the marriage life, you destroy what you intend to 
 strengthen. Now the principles and germs of Protestant legis- 
 lation in the sixteenth century were right, and identical over 
 the whole of Eui-ope. They may be reduced to the following 
 formula. Marriage is indissoluble except by death : death is 
 natural or civil ; civil death is incurred by adultery, and by perti- 
 nacious, wilful desertion, when well established. This principle is 
 proclaimed by the Reformation in England, and by all ecclesias- 
 tical ordinances of reformed governments on the Continent. But 
 this germ was nowhere fully and consistently developed. In 
 England the hierarchical reaction under James the First (which 
 commenced under Elizabeth, and was not broken up by the mon- 
 archical reform of 1688 and the following years) produced one of 
 the most glaring contradictions in principle and practice which 
 the history of legislation exhibits. The Protestant principle, as 
 to adultery (on the part of the wife), was maintained in acts of the 
 highest legislative authority, but denied in the courts of justice. 
 These courts judged according to the mediaeval canon law, which 
 admits of no divorce. Thus, by strict law, separation alone could 
 be pronounced : the dissolution of the matrimonial tie required an 
 Act of Parliament (a privilegium in the classical sense of the 
 term) ; and divorce thus became, as it has well been said, the 
 privilege of the aristocracy. The principle of civil death, as the 
 consequence of pertinacious, wilful desertion, was entirely lost 
 sight of in courts of law, and not even theoretically deve- 
 loped in works on jurisprudence. Thus, the middle and lower 
 classes had no redress in either case, and the lowest retained 
 the old Briton* (not Saxon) custom of legalizing the dissolution 
 of marriage, in case of the infidelity of the woman, by a fictitious 
 sale, which has given rise to so many absurd fables. The only 
 counterpoise to the pernicious consequences which ensued was the 
 sound moral state of the middle classes, raised by the Puritan 
 
 * See Auxiliaire Breton, Nov. 1840. 
 
23G INTEEPRETATION AND ArPLICATION. 
 
 movement of the middle of the seventeenth century, and con- 
 firmed by the moral settlement of the constitutional monarchy 
 in 1688. 
 
 The Scotch, Dutch, and Swiss reformers, with Puritanical zeal, 
 overstepped on the other side, more or less, the boundaries of civil 
 legislation, by making adultery a public crime, punishable with 
 death, whereas the ancient Church wisely reserved the right of 
 complaint exclusively to the injured party. The Lutheran 
 Churches finally (with the exception of free Sweden) fell 
 under the yoke of consistorial courts named by the Prince, and 
 therefore were thrown upon civil legislation, which was always 
 dictatorial, sometimes of doubtful morality. These courts found 
 themselves insensibly involved in the legal quibbles of half-senti- 
 mental half-servile latitudinarians, doctors and professors, the 
 advisers of the Princes. These theorists established the senti- 
 mental principle, that adultery might be interpreted in the in- 
 tellectual sense. But before such theories became law, the moral 
 obtuseness of the nobility, and the corruption of the courts in 
 Germany, during the eighteenth century, had produced a scan- 
 dalous laxity in the legal practice. Such was, besides, the im- 
 perfection of the legal proceedings substituted for the radically 
 abolished canon law, that marriages were dissolved under the 
 letter of the ancient law, for mere wicked sensual gratification, by 
 collusion between the two parties. Adultery was feigned or com- 
 mitted, in order to be detected and evidenced, and the dissolution 
 was pronounced in consequence. This state of things was so 
 strongly deprecated about the middle of the eighteenth century, 
 and. particularly in Saxony (corrupted by its Roman Catholic 
 court), that the law of divorce enacted by Frederic the Great 
 satisfied the moral feelings of the people, by putting an end to a 
 demoralizing system of fraud, deeply as it wounded the Christian 
 principle by making the marriage tie, theoretically, almost as 
 easy to be dissolved as the ancient legal concubinage. There 
 are, however, three facts which must never be lost sight of. 
 First, that what the civil law now permitted was never sanctioned 
 by any ecclesiastical decision, whether synodically, or by solemn 
 consistorial verdict, even in that lacerated state of mutilated 
 Germany. Secondly, that it was never approved and practically 
 
THE LAW OF DIVORCE. 237 
 
 adopted by the great mass of the population. Thirdly, that the 
 nobility, after its regeneration bj the national reforms which 
 ensued after 1806, learned, upon the whole, to show a respect for 
 Christian principles and moi'al restraint, which the reformers and 
 the national mind, as represented by the middle classes, required 
 in vain from their ancestors in the seventeenth and eighteenth 
 centuries. Every one is now convinced that a reform is necessary, 
 and will soon take place, because the public mind recoils fro m the 
 laxity of the principles of the last century, and because the system 
 of the seventeenth century is losing ground daily. Ignorance 
 of the ancient Church law, and reactionary aversion to the 
 principle of marriage by civil contract (as it existed in the early 
 Church), merely because that principle was re-established 
 by the Code Napoleon — these, and not popular licentious- 
 ness, stand in the way of efficient reform. Many governments 
 seem to have still to learn that Protestant Princes cannot aid 
 Christianity, as their ancestors were called to do three hundred 
 years ago, by dictatorial acts, much less by the aid of the police. 
 The nuptial benediction (like confirmation) is still considered 
 by jurists of European reputation and court theologians to be 
 more sanctified and more sure of respect, when imposed by a 
 police law, than when freely required by the parties. Every 
 one, not as ignorant of ancient Church law as are some pre- 
 judiced and narrow-minded men, is aware that matrimony ori- 
 ginates in the well-considered mutual consent of the two parties 
 when qualified to form an opinion, that is to say, being of age ; and 
 that its consummation, the natural consequence of that consent, 
 constitutes the mystery, the " sacramentum," in marriage, 
 even according to the more approved theory of the Roman 
 Catholic canonists. The civil contract, as well as the re- 
 ligious ceremony, ratifies the pledge : the one ensures its 
 legal consequences, the other hallows it in the face of the 
 congregation, by prayer and moral admonition. The State has 
 nothing to do with the second, when once the principle of 
 intolerance and State-religion is abandoned. It cannot there- 
 fore admit of a religious ceremony, substituted for the civil 
 law of the land, having a civil effect. Christianity itself can 
 expect little or no blessing from an act enforced by the law in 
 
238 INTERPRETATION AND APPLICATION. 
 
 order to ensure civil consequences : in France experience shows 
 that the respect attaching to the religious ceremony is in an 
 inverse ratio to the police compulsion. The same results have, 
 as before observed, ensued in England since Peel's legislation. 
 
 More than ten years ago, a reform, indeed, was attempted, 
 ins]3ired by most respectable motives. It failed, however, because 
 the project, by which these praiseworthy intentions were intended 
 to be realized, presented itself without any grand, positive, re- 
 constructive, principle ; and because, while appealing to religious 
 principles, with the exception of some well-meant but very un- 
 profitable legal admonitions by the ministers of religion, its 
 whole machinery consisted of police-regulations, fines, imprison- 
 ment, and an inquisitorial proceeding all together. Public 
 opinion declared itself so strongly against such an anachronism, 
 that the project was abandoned, except as regarded the amend- 
 ment of the order of procedure. The historian will not see in 
 this opposition a national predilection for either immoral or irre- 
 ligious laxity in legislation. It was based on the firm and 
 highly honourable grounds of a conviction, that the sanctity of 
 matrimony cannot be enhanced by police regulations, fines, and 
 personal penalties, which, moreover, can never be practically 
 enforced in the higher classes. The whole scheme was besides 
 condemned, being connected with reactionary designs both in 
 political and ecclesiastical affairs. The revolution of 1848 has 
 only retarded a better reform, which is required and will take 
 place in the course of the next ten years. 
 
 Here again, according to all appearances, England will take 
 the lead, next year perhaps, and on principles which every friend 
 of Protestant Christianity and of humanity must hail with thank- 
 fulness. These indeed can be no other than those of the Gospel. 
 The sequel will be, that the Apostolical ])ractice will be re-esta- 
 blished as Christian law, as more or less correctly formulized by 
 our reformers. There is only one point on which any doubt can 
 exist. According to St. Pavil's advice (for he lays down no rule, 
 except where he gives it as " a word of the Lord"), as inter- 
 preted and applied by the ancient Church, the wife ought under 
 no circumstances to sue for the dissolution of the matrimonial tie, 
 consequently not even on account of the infidelity of the husband. 
 
THE LAW OF DIVORCE. 239 
 
 The universal feeling in the Christian world is unmistakeably in 
 favour of man and woman enjoying a perfectly equal position, 
 in a moral point of view, and every apparent deviation from 
 this principle will be very unpopular with the most respect- 
 able portion of society. But the question for the legislator to 
 consider is, whether this feeling would be well applied to the 
 law of divorce, or whether St. Paul's advice, and the un- 
 doubted use of the ancient Church (attested even by the Greek 
 canons), be not founded upon an eternally true appreciation of 
 human nature ? So long as woman alone can bring forth children^ 
 so long can the highest trust of society, namely, the securing the 
 paternity, be imposed only upon woman. Man cannot commit 
 adultery in the strict sense (corrupted by St. Augustine in the 
 western Church), because he cannot falsify his paternity. He may 
 cause another's wife to commit adultery ; in which case the com- 
 plaint lies with the injured husband. The question is, whether 
 his own wife is to have a right of claiming more than what she 
 certainly ought to have, the right of separation ; a form which 
 continental legislation has foolishly rejected as papistic. No 
 lawyer who knows the history of canon law will maintain that 
 the form of temporary separation is of papistic origin, and every 
 practical observer of the effects of such separation will acknowledge 
 its expediency. It would far exceed the limits of this sketch to 
 enter into a full discussion of this point, and to go through the 
 whole question as it ought to be treated : and I have no difficulty 
 in saying, that it has never been so treated either by Protestants 
 or Roman Catholics. It is however sufficiently apparent, I 
 think, even from our present point of view, that it must be a 
 question of the highest importance, to define the legal process 
 which ought to be established in matrimonial cases. The old 
 canonical trial is, after all, better than any thing hitherto sub- 
 stituted for it, and exhibits the best specimen of the right use 
 of evidence, and of cross-examination, so well developed in the 
 English trial by jury. The Scotch mode of trying them is 
 inferior to the English, and very imperfect : indeed, if public 
 opinion in Scotland were not so very strict, collusion would be 
 easy under such a system of judicial proceedings. 
 
240 INTERPRETATION AND APPLICATION. 
 
 I have now to consider and pass j udgment with the same frank- 
 Jiess upon the second dark point in the social system of Protestant 
 humanity: Slavery, as it exists in the southern states of the 
 Union. The opprobrium which this subject has brought upon 
 Protestant Christendom is greater even than that produced by the 
 laxity of the Prussian law of divorce. A book, the marvellous 
 success of which has pronounced the verdict of the human race, 
 and which has received documentary proof by the Key to it, has 
 made this point more prominent in the consciousness of the 
 Christian mind than it ever was before. Now, divesting that 
 topic of all that is based upon erroneous views of the system, or 
 connected with the passions of party-feeling, the conscien- 
 tious historian, placed upon the elevated point of observation 
 presented to us by the subject of this volume, must say : 
 The legal existence of slavery in itself is not incompatible 
 with Christianity. It is besides an evil engrafted, against their 
 remonstrances, upon those states, when they were English 
 colonies. But the historian must add, that the principle 
 which makes its extinction legally or practically impossible is 
 decidedly anti-Christian : or, in other words, it is incom- 
 patible with Christianity, that state legislation should arrogate 
 to itself the inherent right of the slave-holding citizen to 
 manumit his slave, and to prepare him for liberty by allowing him 
 useful education and free labour. There does not exist in the 
 history of any civilized nation, even among the Gentiles, such 
 an encroachment upon the liberty of the citizen, and such an 
 aggressive act of human legislation against the word of Christ 
 and the will of God, as revealed to us in the Gospel and in 
 conscience. The Roman law was harsh throughout, frequently 
 cruel ; and this natural hard-heartedness shows itself in the 
 laws respecting their slaves. But the owner of the slave could 
 as well manumit him as he manumitted his son, and could 
 allow him to acquire money for his emancipation as well as 
 education : the end of which was almost invariably manumission. 
 Nor does it require any proof, according to the very texts of the 
 laws and the letter of the decisions of the highest judicial autho- 
 rities in those states, cited by the illustrious authoress of Uncle 
 Tom's Cabin in her Key (Part II. ch. xiii.), to establish the 
 
THE LAW OF SLAVERY IN THE UNITED STATES. 241 
 
 fact that in the four States of South Carolina, Georgia, 
 Alabama, and Mississippi (and in fact, also, in North Carolina), 
 emancipation cannot be effected, except by a special act of the 
 legislature, sanctioning a solemn and well-grounded act of the 
 owner — an act coupled with the most studied difficulties, and 
 open to most cruel opposition from interested parties. 
 
 The law of the state of Mississippi is laid down by Judge 
 Stroud in the following terms : 
 
 " The emancipation must be an instrument in loriting, a last will 
 or deed, &c., under seal attested by at least two credible witnesses or 
 acknowledged in the court of the county or corporation where tlie 
 emancipator resides ; proof satisfactory to the General Assembly 
 must be adduced that the slave has done some meritorious act for the 
 benefit of his master, or rendered some distinguished service to the 
 State ; all which circumstances are but pre-reqicisites, and are of no 
 efficacy until a special Act of Assembly sanctions the emancipation ; 
 to which may be added, as has been already stated, a saving of the 
 rights of creditors, and the protection of the loidoiv's thirds." 
 
 The same pre-requisite of " meritorious services, to be ad- 
 judicated on and allowed by the County Court," is exacted by 
 an Act of the General Assembly of North Carolina ; and all 
 slaves emancipated contrary to the provisions of this Act are to 
 be committed to the jail of the county, and at the next court 
 held for that county to be sold to the highest bidder. 
 
 The law of North Carolina adds this clause : 
 
 " The sheriff is directed, five days before the time for the sale of the 
 emancipated negro, to give notice, in writing, to the person by whom 
 the emancipation was made, to the end that such person may, if he 
 'thinks proper, renew his claim to the negro so emancipated by him ; 
 on failure to do which, the sale is to be made by the sheriff, and one- 
 fifth part of the net proceeds is to become the property of the free- 
 holder by whom the apprehension was made, and the remaining 
 four-fifths are to be paid into the public treasury." 
 
 Nor is this legislation an inoperative one. Mrs. Beecher 
 Stowe gives from the public papers the following case : 
 
 "A man of the name of Elisha Brazealle, a planter in Jefferson 
 Coun'y, Mississippi, was attacked with a loathsome disease. During 
 VOL. ir. R 
 
242 INTERPRETATION AND APPLICATION, 
 
 his illness he was faithfully nursed by a mulatto slave, to whose 
 assiduous attentions he felt that he owed his life. He was duly im- 
 pressed by her devotion^ and soon after his recovery took her to Ohio, 
 and had her educated. She was very intelligent, and improved her 
 advantages so rapidly that when he visited her again he determined 
 to marry her. He executed a deed for her emancipation, and had it 
 recorded both in the States of Ohio and Mississippi, and made her his 
 wife. 
 
 " Mr. Brazealle returned with her to Mississippi, and in process of 
 time had a son. After a few years he sickened and died, leaving a 
 will, in which, after reciting the deed of emancipation, he declared his 
 intention to ratify it, and devised all his property to this lad, ac- 
 knowledging him in the will to be his son. 
 
 " Some poor and distant relations in North Carolina, whom he did 
 not know, and for whom he did not care, hearing of his death, came 
 on to Mississippi, and claimed the property thus devised. They 
 instituted a suit for its recovery, and the case (it is reported in 
 Howard's Mississippi Reports, vol. ii. p. 837.) came before Judge 
 Sharkey, our new consul at Havana. He decided it, and in that 
 decision declared the act of emancipation an offence against morality, 
 and pernicious and detestable as an example, He set aside the will ; 
 gave the property of Brazealle to his distant relations, condemned 
 Brazealle's son, arid his ivife, that son's mother, again to bondage, and 
 made them the slaves of these North Carolina kinsmen, as part of the 
 assets of the estate." 
 
 Chief Justice Sharkey observes, that although, according to 
 principles of national comity, "contracts are to be construed 
 according to the laws of the country or state where they are 
 made," yet these principles are not to be followed when they 
 lead to conclusions in conflict with " the great and fundamental 
 policy of the State." He then continues : 
 
 " Let us apply these principles to the deed of emancipation. To 
 give it validity would be, in the first place, a violation of the declared 
 policy, and contrary to a positive law of the State. 
 
 " The policy of the State is indicated by the general course of 
 legislation on a given subject ; and we find that free negroes are 
 deemed offensive, because they are not permitted to emigrate or to 
 remain in the State. 
 
 " The state of the case shows conclusively that the contract had its 
 origin in an offence against morality, pernicious and detestable as 
 
THE LAW OP SLAVERY IN THE UNITED STATES. 243 
 
 an example. But, above all, it seems to have been planned and 
 executed with a fixed design to evade the rigour of the laws of this 
 State." 
 
 Now, passing over the gross Pharisaism of the moral 
 remark, I am afraid all this is good law ; but, for this very 
 reason, it condemns the law. Nobody denies that a change of the 
 law must be left to the State legislatures; but no free heart, 
 unawed by Lynch Law, and not warped by national suscepti- 
 bility, will allow that the system is compatible with a profession 
 of Christianity. Such an inroad both upon the liberty of the 
 individual citizen and the dictates of Christianity can be ex- 
 plained, but it can never be justified. It is unparalleled in the 
 history of the world. It is put to shame by the Roman Catholic 
 Colonies, and how could it consist with the Gospel? If we 
 ask Christ and the Apostles and the ancient Christians, they 
 tell us unanimously, that the rest must be left to the quiet but 
 irresistible working of the spirit of Christianity in a Christian 
 people. Faith in that spirit is required from the opponents 
 of the present system as well as from its abettors. I will not 
 conceal the fact that my own faith in the power of that spirit, 
 among a nation conspicuous for so much Christian feeling and 
 moral earnestness, remains unshaken. But I will also not 
 refrain from saying, with the earnestness of a historian and with 
 the sincerity of a Christian, that the eyes of all nations are upon 
 the people of the United States, as to what they will do on this 
 point at this moment. It rests with them to belie the doubts of 
 those who do not believe in their national morality, and to 
 give to the world an example of the reality of their liberty, 
 and of the sincerity of their Christian profession. The greater 
 the Christian vocation of a nation is, the higher and the more 
 difficult the problem will be which it must solve — or perish. 
 All nations fall morally before they perish politically ; repub- 
 lican nations before all others ; and there are already distress- 
 ing signs which show the baneful influence of the system, even 
 beyond the Slave States. The moral oppression of the coloured 
 people in the free-labour States is one of those distressing 
 symptoms. Such a state of things warps the judgment of 
 
 R 2 
 
244 CONCLUSION. 
 
 American writers even in philosophical and historical researches, 
 and renders that great but absolute nation more susceptible as 
 to any frank Christian discussion of this their dark point, than 
 despotic princes usually are when their system of dynastic abso- 
 lutism is attacked. In the meantime, it must never be forgotten, 
 that even now slavery is the exception, free labour the rule ; and 
 that the letter and spirit of the Constitution are in as glaring 
 contradiction to that exceptional evil of State Legislation, as the 
 latter is to the Gospel and the whole history of Christianity. 
 
 Without prying into the secrets of Providence, one may 
 reasonably believe that the great destiny of the Anglo-Saxon race 
 in the other hemisphere cannot be fulfilled in all its extent and 
 glory, until the coloured race, christianized and educated for 
 municipal liberty, starts with the moral energy of the father, 
 and the bodily aptitude of the mother, into those parts of the 
 American continent, where the Anglo-Saxon cannot work, and 
 therefore not live worthy of himself, and where the two races 
 which now hold it, the Indian and the Spanish, are withering 
 away or dying in convulsions. 
 
 "Whatever is in the plan of Eternal Providence, must be done, 
 and will be done. The laws of the moral government of the world 
 are as irresistible as the physical laws of the universe. The only 
 option which nations have is to become the willing or the unwill- 
 ing instruments of this eternal order ; to rise by fulfilling its 
 decrees, or to be crushed by its wheels when in the progress of 
 ages they pass over what is in their way ; to live in the annals 
 of mankind as a blessing to future generations, or as a curse for 
 all times to come. 
 
NOTES 
 
 THE INTERPRETATION AND APPLICATION. 
 
 TO THE FIRST BOOK (BAPTISM). 
 
 Note A. p. 114. 
 
 THE THREE PASSAGES OF ORIGEN ABOUT THE BAPTISM OP LITTLE 
 
 CHILDREN. 
 
 In Ep. ad Rom. V. (0pp. iv. p. r)65., speaking of the corpus peccati) : 
 " Idee et ecclesia ab Apostolis traditionem suscepit, etiam parvulis 
 baptismum dare. Sciebant illi, quibus Christianorum secreta com- 
 missa sunt mysteriorum, quod assent in omnibus genuinas sordes pec- 
 cati, quse per aquani et spiritum ablui deberent." 
 
 Iji Levit. Homil. VIII. (0pp. ii. p. 230.) : « Addi his etiam illud 
 potest, ut requiratur quid causa? sit cum baptisma ecclesijE pro remis- 
 sione peccatorum detur, secundum ecclesias observantiam etiam par- 
 Tuiis baptismum dare : cum utique, si nihil esset in parvulis, quod 
 ad remissionem deberet et indulgentiam pertinere, gratia baptismi 
 superflua videretur." 
 
 In Lucam Homil. XIV. (0pp. iii. p. 948,): "Parvuli baptizantur 
 in remissionem peccatorum. Quorum peccatorum ? vel quo tempore 
 peccaverunt ? aut quomodo potest ulla lavacri in parvulis ratio sub- 
 sistere, nisi juxta ilium sensum, de quo paulo ante diximus : 'Nullus 
 mundus a sorde, nee si unius diei quidem fuerit vita ejus super 
 terram ? ' Et quia per baptismi sacramentum nativitatis sordes de- 
 ponuntur, propterea baptizantur et parvuli : ' Nisi enim quis renatus 
 fuerit ex aqua et spiritu, non poterit intrare in regnum coelorum.' " 
 
 B 3 
 
246 NOTES TO INTERPRETATION AND APPLICATION. 
 
 Note B. p. 127. 
 
 LITTJKGICAL FORMULARIES OF THE GERMAN LUTHERAN CHURCHES FOR 
 
 CONFUIMATION. 
 
 I. According to the " AUgemeines evangelisches Gesang- und Gebet- 
 buch, Hamburg, 1846," compiled from the Austrian Agenda 
 (1576), and other authorized Litm-gies of the 16th and 17th 
 Centuries. 
 
 Alternate Chant of Choir and Congregation, Psalm xxxiv. : 
 
 I will alway give thanks unto the Lord : 
 His praise shall ever be in my mouth, &c. 
 
 (Or the Veni Sancte Spiritus, chanted by the Choir or Congregation, 
 " Komm heiliger Geist erfiill die Herzen " :) 
 
 Come Holy Ghost, 
 
 Fulfil the hearts of Thy believers, 
 
 And kindle in them the fire of Thy divine Love ; 
 
 Thou who through the manifoldness of tongues 
 
 Hast gathered the nations of the whole earth 
 
 In unity of faith : 
 
 Hallelujah ! Hallelujah ! 
 
 (Then the Minister shall address the People, either in a free exhorta- 
 tion, or according to the Liturgy of the Austrian Agenda of 1571 :) 
 
 Beloved in the Lord ! 
 Ye see here before you these children our fellow-heirs in Christ, 
 who through holy baptism have been in their childhood grafted into 
 the Lord Christ and into His holy Church. But inasmuch as they 
 have been led to inquire into the knowledge of Christian doctrine and 
 of godliness, they now desire with all their heart to be allowed to ap- 
 proach more truly, more fully, and more closely to our and their 
 Saviour Jesus Christ, and to His holy Church ; that is, by the use 
 of the Holy Supper and Sacrament of the Body and Blood of Jesus 
 Christ. Now in order that this may be done with greater effect, and 
 to the strengthening of their faith by the Holy Ghost, so that for the 
 rest of their lives it may be to their health in Christ and turn to their 
 good, it becometh us that we should pray God our Heavenly Father, 
 in the name of Christ, that He would mercifully grant them hereto 
 His grace and the help of the Holy Spirit, that henceforth our Lord 
 
GERMAN LUTHERAN CONFIRMATION. 247 
 
 Christ may more richly dwell in them, and they in Christ ; that they 
 may daily increase in faith, love, and patience, together with all the 
 fruits of the Holy Spirit ; that they may be furthered in them, and 
 therein abide unto the end, and be saved. 
 
 In order that they may attain unto this, I beseech you to pray with 
 me in full trust in the name of Jesus : 
 
 Our Father which art in Heaven, &c. 
 
 (The Minister shall then say :) 
 
 Beloved in the Lord ! 
 
 In ancient times it was a custom that they who were grown up 
 should first learn the chief points of Christian doctrine, and after they 
 had been sufficiently instructed therein, they renounced, before bap- 
 tism, themselves, the devil, the world and its works, and were accord- 
 ingly baptized. Then prayer was made for them, with the laying on 
 of hands, that they might receive the gift of the Holy Ghost, in order 
 that through His grace and mighty working they should be confirmed 
 and strengthened in the knowledge of the truth of the Gospel of Christ, 
 to confess the same without fear, more particularly in the time of per- 
 secution, so that they might more and more increase from day to day 
 in faith and love, and in all Christian virtues and the fruits of the 
 Spirit, and be continually preserved in Christ and in His grace throu"-li 
 the Holy Spirit, as being the earnest of life. 
 
 Ye well know, beloved in the Lord, that these children whom ye 
 see standing round (with their parents and sponsors) were baptized 
 into our Church in their infancy, at a time when they could not 
 of their own selves bear witness to or promise anything. They have 
 therefore now assembled here, in order to fulfil, with a joyful heart 
 and with a confession of their faith, all that which in times of old they 
 that were grown up in the Church were accustomed to perform : they 
 are also willing to profess that they have diligently learnt, and do 
 firmly believe, the chief points of the Christian religion in the Church 
 of God, as their sponsors have in their name vowed and promised at 
 holy baptism : finally, they are ready with their own mouths to con- 
 fess the weakness and infirmity which, according to the flesh, is born 
 in them, " to renounce the devil and the world, and to give up them- 
 selves wholly to the Lord Jesus Christ and to His Church, that through 
 the prayer of the Church, and through the right use of the Holy Sacra- 
 ment they may, like the rest of the faithful, receive increase of the 
 Holy Ghost, and be made partakers of His gifts in the Church of God, 
 
 B 4 
 
248 NOTES TO INTEKPRETATION AND APPLICATION. 
 
 that they may so lead the life which God grants them in this earth, 
 according to the Word of God, as well becometh and befitteth the true 
 followers of Jesus Christ. 
 
 Wherefore I earnestly exhort you all that you will be witnesses of 
 this holy profession, which they are now about to make before God 
 and before His Church, and that you will earnestly pray for them : 
 and also that each one of you will diligently attend to everything, and 
 apply it to himself, and so interpret it ; remembering how ye your- 
 selves did once likewise make confession of your faith and promise of 
 obedience unto the Church, and liow for this reason it should be your 
 duty, after such promise, to order your life to the honour of God and 
 the bettering of your neighbour, and to follow the exhortation of the 
 Lord Jesus Christ, when he saith, " Let your light so shine before 
 men that they may see your good works, and glorify your Father 
 which is in heaven." 
 
 (Or the Minister may use the following instead :) 
 
 My Christian Friends ! 
 We have great reason to give hearty thanks to God, the Father of 
 our Loi'd Jesus Christ, who alone beginneth and accomplisheth every 
 good work, that He hath presented these children to His Church, that 
 He hath accepted them in holy baptism, and now hath so far en- 
 lightened them, that they themselves have come to the knowledge of 
 this His great mercy and goodness, and of their redemption in Christ 
 Jesus, His beloved Son, our Lord, and are now ready to profess the 
 same before the congregation. 
 
 (Then the Minister turning to the Children, shall say :) 
 
 And as for you, my dear children, both sons and daughters, ye 
 must also give thanks and praise to God, that He hath blessed you 
 so highly from your birth and baptism, through your parents, spon- 
 sors, and friends (who now at this hour are joresenting you to God 
 and to His congregation), and beseech Him that He may continue 
 to bless you, if so be that ye remain faithful, and grow and increase 
 in faith. 
 
 I exhort you therefore, through Jesus Christ, that ye fulfil with 
 willing mind that which it becometh you to do, and that ye give an 
 answer to the questions which I shall put to you, not only with an 
 audible voice, but also with a devout mind, and in the fear of God the 
 Lord, who is a witness and a judge of your thoughts, resolves, words, 
 and promises. 
 
GERMAN LUTHERAN CONFIRMATION. 249 
 
 (Then tl«e Minister shall hold an) 
 Examination in the chief Points of the Christian Faith. 
 
 (After this Examination the Minister shall proceed as follows :) 
 My dear Children ! 
 
 Now that ye have proved how that ye have been sufficiently and 
 suitably instructed in the alone saving truth of the Word of God, ye 
 shall solemnly declare also at this time, before God and this congre- 
 gation, that ye have not only heard this doctrine from your teacher, 
 but are ready to profess it as your own faith before God and man ; 
 and that ye are willing to affirm, and to keep as your own vow, the 
 vow which was made for you at holy baptism. Let, then, the con- 
 gregation hear you make, with devout and joyful heart, your confes- 
 sion, such as the universal Christian Church hath professed at all 
 times, and all true believers have sealed in life and death, and so de- 
 voutly say after me, 
 
 I believe in God the Father Almighty, &c. 
 
 (to the end of the Apostles' Creed, the Children repeating each sen- 
 tence after the Minister.) 
 
 (Then shall the Minister go on to say :) 
 
 Minister. Do ye now profess, before the face of the living God, this 
 our Christian faith, and will ye abide therein, and order your whole 
 life accordingly, and die therein ? 
 
 Children. Yea, so we will, with all our heart, by the help of our 
 Lord Jesus Christ. 
 
 Minister and People. Amen. 
 
 Minister, Do ye renounce the devil, with all his works and ways ? 
 Do ye renounce the world, with all its pomps and vanities ? Do ye 
 renounce all fleshly lusts and desires, so that ye will not allow them 
 to have dominion over you, nor yourselves serve the law which is in 
 your members ? 
 
 Children. Yea, we renounce them all. 
 
 Minister and People. Amen. 
 
 3Iinister. Do ye then vow that ye will give up yourselves to obey 
 Christ, and henceforth to live and to do according to your faith and 
 profession, and faithfully to keep what ye here have promised ? 
 
 Children. Yea, so we will, by the grace and help of our Lord Jesus 
 Christ. 
 
 Minister and People. Amen. 
 
250 NOTES TO INTERPKETATION AND APPLICATION. 
 
 Minister. On this your profession and vow, I receive you, in virtue 
 of my office as ordained Minister of the "Word of God, and in the face 
 of this congregation, into the full communion of the Church, and 
 bestow upon you all the rights, benefits, and gifts which our Lord 
 Jesus Christ hath won and given to the faithful members of His con- 
 gregation ; and I do this in the name of God the Father, the Son, 
 and the Holy Ghost ! Amen. 
 Choir and People. Amen. 
 
 Minister. Kneel down and receive the blessing of the Lord. 
 (Then laying his hand on the head of each Child he shall say:) 
 Receive ye the Holy Ghost, 
 A guard and shield from all evil, 
 The strength and help to all good. 
 
 From the gracious hand of the Father, and the Son, and the Holy 
 Ghost. Amen. 
 Choir. Amen. Amen. Amen. 
 
 (Or this :) 
 
 God the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost give thee His grace, 
 a guard and shield from all evil, the strength and help to all good, 
 for the precious merit's sake of our only Saviour Jesus Christ. Amen. 
 
 Choir. Amen. Amen. Amen. 
 
 (While the Confirmation is proceeding, the Choir shall sing the 
 following :) 
 Receive ye the Holy Ghost, 
 A guard and shield from all evil. 
 The strength and help to all good, 
 
 From the gracious hand of the Father, and the Son, and the Holy 
 Ghost. Amen. 
 Choir. Amen. Amen. Amen. 
 Minister. Let us pray. 
 
 O Lord Jesu Christ, Son of God, who hast said, " If ye who are 
 evil know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more 
 will your Heavenly Father give His Holy Spirit to them that ask 
 Him ; " and, " If two of you shall agree on earth as touching anything 
 that they shall ask, it shall be done for them of my Father which is 
 in heaven : " we pray Thee, strengthen these children with Thy Holy 
 Spirit, that they may ever remain in the obedience of Thy gospel, that 
 they may manfully fight against sin, the world, and the devil, nor 
 grieve the Holy Spirit, nor wound Thy Holy Church by any offence 
 
GEEMAN LUTHERAN CONFIRMATION. 251 
 
 of theirs ; but that their lives may serve to Thy praise, to their own 
 salvation, and the bettering of others, as Thou hast ordered and also 
 hast promised us. Amen. 
 
 (Or this :) 
 O Lord God, Heavenly Father, who through Thine unspeakable 
 wisdom and righteousness hast hidden the mystery of Thy kingdom 
 from the wise of this world, and hast manifested it to babes, we all 
 give Thee hearty thanks for Thy great goodness, by which Thou hast 
 enabled these children to come to such excellent knowledge, that they 
 have not only believed from their hearts, but also confessed with their 
 mouths, Thy Son Jesus Christ, and the truth of the Gospel : we 
 humbly and earnestly beseech Thee that Thou wouldest further en- 
 lighten and strengthen their hearts and minds through Thy Holy 
 Spirit, that they being gifted with true and lively faith, with the fear 
 of God and with stedfastness, also having a good understanding in all 
 spiritual things, may more and more proceed from day to day in all 
 that is good for their salvation, and also may bring forth the fruits of 
 faith and love to the honour of Thy holy Name, and therein con- 
 tinually and victoriously abide until that day when all they that have 
 fought well and manfully shall receive the crown of righteousness 
 through Jesus Christ, Thy Son, our Lord, who with Thee and the 
 Holy Ghost liveth and reigneth world without end. Amen. 
 
 (Then the Minister, turning to the Congregation, shall say :) 
 
 Beloved in the Lord ! 
 Ye have heard with your own ears the good and Christian profession 
 and vow made by these children : and inasmuch as prayer hath been 
 offered up for them by the whole Church, it is certain that the Lord 
 will accept such prayer, made in His Name ; and accordingly these 
 childi'en may be duly admitted, with all other faithful peoi^le, to the 
 supper of Jesus Christ. It will be then your part and duty to ac- 
 knowledge them as dear children of God in Christ Jesus, as yovir 
 brethren, nearest of kin, as joint heirs with yourselves and with the 
 Lord. Wherefore I commend them most earnestly to your keeping, 
 that ye may be ready to show them every Christian service and love, 
 in body and soul, through Christ our Lord. Amen. 
 
 (After this a Hymn shall be sung. The following verse is usually 
 chosen, " Lass mich dein sein und bleiben " : 
 
 Let me be Thine for ever, 
 Thou good and faithful Lord ! 
 
252 NOTES TO INTERPRETATION AND APPLICATION. 
 
 Nor world nor sin me sever 
 
 From Thee and Thy dear Word : 
 
 Keep me, O Lord, and raise me 
 With Thine own arm ; then I 
 
 With heart and mind will praise Thee, 
 Through all eternity.) 
 
 (Then the Minister shall say :) 
 
 The God of peace sanctify you throughly, and may your whole spirit 
 and soul and body be preserved blameless until the coming of our 
 Lord Jesus Christ ! Faithful is He who calleth you, who also will do 
 it. Amen. 
 
 Choir. Amen. Amen. Amen. 
 
 II, The Order of Confirmation, as agreed upon for the German 
 Congregation at Jerusalem. 
 
 (A hymn shall be sung by the People, after which the Minister shall 
 
 say :) 
 Our help cometh from the Lord: who hath made heaven and earth. 
 
 Dearly beloved in the Lord ! 
 
 Ye see here before you these children, fellow-heirs with us in Christ, 
 and by holy baptism grafted into the body of Christ and received into 
 His Church. They have been, since that time, frequently reminded 
 of the baptismal covenant, instructed in the discipline of the Gospel, 
 and of late fully taught the Christian doctrine of salvation. They 
 desire now to be received into its fullest communion, as true soldiers 
 of Christ, and to participate in all the graces which the Lord promises 
 to His faithful people in His Holy Communion ; and as a sure witness 
 of this their godly desire, they offer now to give account of their faith 
 publicly before God and this Christian congregation, and to renew by 
 a solemn vow and profession the covenant into which they entered in 
 baptism, to the end that they may be presented to the Bishop, and 
 allowed to receive the blessing of the Church given through his hands, 
 and then be admitted to the Holy Communion, as the seal of such vow 
 and blessing. 
 
 Wherefore I exhort you all, in the name of God, that you will give 
 heed to this examination, and to the testimony which they are about 
 to give of their faith, with an attentive and devout mind. 
 
GERMAN LUTHERAN CONFIRMATION. 253 
 
 And as for you, my dear Children, I exhort you now, to give with 
 all readiness account of that which you have learnt, with good confi- 
 dence and lively faith in your dear Saviour and Mediator, who hath 
 promised, saying, " Lo ! I am with you alway, even unto the end of 
 the world." 
 
 (Then the Minister shall hold an) 
 Examination. 
 (This being concluded, he shall go on to say :) 
 My dear Children ! &c., as above, unto the end of the service. 
 (After which shall follow the Order of Confirmation, according to the 
 English Prayer-book, beginning with " Our help is in the Name 
 of the Lord," &c. unto the end.) 
 
 Bishop. Our help is in the Name of the Lord : 
 Answer. Who hath made heaven and earth. 
 Bishop. Blessed be the Name of the Lord : 
 Answer. Henceforth, world without end. 
 Bishop. Lord, hear our prayers. 
 Anstver. And let our cry come unto Thee. 
 
 The Bishop. Let us pray. 
 
 Almighty and everliving God, who hast vouchsafed to regenerate 
 these Thy servants by water and the Holy Ghost, and hast given 
 unto them forgiveness of all their sins ; strengthen them, we beseech 
 Thee, O Lord, with the Holy Ghost the Comforter, and daily increase 
 in them Thy manifold gifts of grace ; the spirit of wisdom and un- 
 derstanding ; the spirit of counsel and ghostly strength ; the spirit of 
 knowledge and true godliness ; and fill them, O Lord, with the spirit 
 of Thy holy fear, now and for ever. Amen. 
 
 (Then all of them in order kneeling before the Bishop, he shall lay his 
 
 hand upon the head of every one severally, saying :) 
 
 Defend, Lord, this Thy servant, with Thy heavenly grace, that 
 
 He may continue Thine for ever, and daily increase in Thy Holy Spirit 
 
 more and more, until he come into Thy everlasting kingdom. Amen 
 
 (Then shall the Bishop say :) 
 
 The Lord be with you. 
 Answer. And with Thy spirit. 
 
 (And all kneeling down, the Bishop shall add:) 
 
254 NOTES TO INTERPllETATION AND APPLICATION. 
 
 Let us pray. 
 
 Our Father wliicli art in heaven, hallowed be Thy Name. Thy 
 Kingdom come. Thy Will be done on earth, as it is in heaven. Give 
 us this day our daily bread. And forgive us our trespasses, as we 
 forgive them that trespass against us. And lead us not into tempt- 
 ation ; but deliver us from evil. Amen. 
 
 (And this Collect :) 
 
 Almighty and everliving God, who makest us both to will and to 
 do those things that be good and acceptable unto Thy Divine Majesty ; 
 we make our humble supplications unto Thee for these Thy servants, 
 upon whom (after the example of Thy holy Apostles) we have now 
 laid our hands, to certify them (by this sign) of Thy favoured gracious 
 goodness towards them. Let Thy Fatherly hand, we beseech Thee, 
 ever be over them. Let Thy Holy Spirit ever be with them, and so 
 lead them in the knowledge and obedience of Thy Word, that in the 
 end they may obtain everlasting life, through our Lord Jesus Christ, 
 who with Thee and the Holy Ghost liveth and reigneth, ever one God, 
 world without end. Amen. 
 
 O Almighty Lord and everlasting God, vouchsafe, we beseech 
 Thee, to direct, sanctify, and govern both our hearts and bodies in the 
 ways of Thy laws, and in the works of Thy commandments ; that 
 through Thy most mighty protection both here and ever we may be 
 preserved in body and soul, through our Lord and Saviour Jesus 
 Christ. Amen. 
 
 (Then the Bishop shall bless them, saying thus :) 
 
 The blessing of God Almighty, the Father, the Son, and the Holy 
 Ghostj be upon you, and remain with you for ever. Amen. 
 
SPURIOUS ADDITION TO 20TH ARTICLE. 255 
 
 TO THE SECOND BOOK (THE CONSTITUTION). 
 Note C. p. 142. 
 
 THE HISTORY OF THE 20tH ARTICLE IN THE ENGLISH ARTICLES OF 
 
 RELIGION. 
 
 The words quoted, with which the 20th Article at present begins (in 
 the Latin text, "Habet Ecclesia ritus statuendi jus et in fidei contro- 
 versiis auctoritatem"), are not in the authentic Latin copy which bears 
 the original signatures of the bishops in the Synod of 1562, when 
 the Articles of Edward VI. were definitely settled ; nor in the docu- 
 ment of the Convocation of 1571, also signed by the bishops: nor are 
 they found in the English editions of Jugg and Cawood, of 1563; nor 
 in the Latin and English editions published under the direction of 
 bishop Jewel in 1571. They are first found in the Latin edition of 
 Wolfe in 1571, and occasionally in subsequent editions until the time 
 of archbishop Laud, who had them inserted in all the authorized copies. 
 Laud was beheaded : the republican Revolution overthrew the whole 
 Church : the Restoration ratified and reestablished this spurious text 
 of the Article. The Revolution of 1689, which introduced real con- 
 stitutional liberty, made that text practically a dead letter, which cir- 
 cumstance may explain the fact, that its spuriousness has never been 
 made, either at that period, or subsequently, the subject of discussion. 
 
 The key to the whole insertion is in the remarkable addition made 
 in Wolfe's edition of 1563, in which that clause first appeared. There, 
 namely, are added the following words of the royal sanction : "Quibus 
 omnibus articulis Serenissima Princeps Elizabeth, &c., per seipsam 
 prius lectis et examinatis, Regium suum assensum prtebuit." 
 
 The late dean of Bristol, Dr. John Lamb, to whom we owe the do- 
 cumentary proof of this curious transaction (in his book, " An histo- 
 rical Account of the Thirty-nine Articles, from their first Promulga- 
 tion in 1553 to their final Establishment in 1571," 1829, 4to.), shows 
 (p. 33.) that the copy of the Articles, as decreed in the Convocation 
 of 1562, remained with the Queen for about a year, during which 
 period the clause was added by Her Majesty. I have no doubt it was 
 done in council, through the ready instrumentality of Cecil, but that it 
 emanated from her own individual will. She was resolved to govern 
 the Church, at least as much as the Pope had done. 
 
256 NOTES TO INTERPRETATION AND APPLICATION. 
 
 TO THE THIRD BOOK (THE CHURCH LITURGY). 
 
 Note D. p. 173. 
 
 WORKS ON THE ENGLISH CHURCH, AND ON LITURGIES IN GENERAL, 
 
 REFERRED TO. 
 
 For the text of the English Liturgies, I have used the second (more 
 correct) edition of the Rev. William Keeling's "LiturgiceBritannicae" 
 (1851, in which the Thirty-nine Articles are omitted) and the 
 " Reliquiae Liturgicse " of the Rev. Peier Hall (in 5 vols. Bath, 1847). 
 As to the Liturgies of the Scotch Episcopal Church, I have compared 
 the text reprinted in the "Fragmeijta Liturgica" of the same author 
 (1848), with the " Office for the Sacrament of the Lord's Supper, 
 with a preliminary Dissertation," by the Rev. John Skinner (Aber- 
 deen, 1807, 8vo.), son of bishop Skinner, author of the " Eccle-' 
 siastical History of Scotland," with which work that of Macrie 
 is to be compared. I have obtained much information as to the rather 
 obscure history of this text from the " Address to the Members of 
 the Episcopal Church in Scotland by a Layman" (supposed to be Lord 
 Medwyn, a Scotch judge), kindly communicated to me by the Right 
 Hon. W. Gladstone. Daniel's text is, on the whole, very correct, and the 
 arrangement sensible : but the relation of the Scotch and Amei'ican 
 Communion Services to each other cannot be made out of it with ex- 
 actness. Upon the Liturgy of the Episcopal Church in the United 
 States, I have used the edition of Brownell (1823, 4to.), with a learned 
 commentary : upon the Hymn-book, the most recent editions pub- 
 lished in Pennsylvania and New York. The distinguished historical 
 work of the Right Rev. Bishop Wilberforce, alluded to in the con- 
 cluding chapter, is entitled, " History of tlie Protestant Episcopal 
 Church in America" (1844 ; 2nd edition, 1845, 8vo.). As to the 
 Constitutional Law of the Church of England, the works of the 
 Rev. William Goode, referred to, bear the titles : " The Doctrine 
 of the Church of England on Non-Episcopal Ordination " (Nov. 
 1851, 8vo.) : and, " A Reply to the Bishop of Exeter's second Arraign- 
 ment of his Metropolitan" (1852). As to the term "Church of 
 Scotland " in the Lvth Canon, see his " Reply to Archdeacon Churton," 
 &c., and, generally, the recent new edition of " The Rule of Faith." 
 
LITURGICAL WORKS REFERRED TO. 257 
 
 I take this opportunity of apologizing for not quoting more accu- 
 rately the rare book mentioned when treating of the German Service 
 of Confirmation as "the Austrian Agenda of 1571." I possessed 
 a fine copy of this most spirited and very rare Liturgy of Austria 
 under the Ens, printed at Linz, in 1571, and known as being prin- 
 cipally the work of Chrytteus. I have made more use of tliis 
 Agenda than of any other in my " Gesang- und Gebetbuch " of 1846 : 
 but I must have lent it since to one of my literary friends who 
 take an interest in my very complete collection of ancient and modern 
 Agenda and Hymn-books (about 500 volumes), and that friend must 
 have forgotten to return it. It is probably the only copy of this rare 
 book in England. 
 
 VOL. II. 
 
PART III. 
 
 THE 
 
 APOLOGY OF HIPPOLYTUS, 
 
 ADDRESSED TO THE 
 
 PEOPLE OF ENGLAND. 
 
 8 2 
 
CTIRISTIANO AUGUSTO BRANDISIO 
 
 VIEO SOCRATICO 
 PHILOSOPHO CIIEISTIANO 
 AMICO CMISSIMO 
 
 IN TUSCULANARUM DISPUTATIONUM MEMOEIAM 
 
 D. D. D. 
 
 T\vKV TO (Tl'JLt(^«XoXoy£Tj' Kal (TVIJl<pi\0(r0(pEll'. 
 
 S 3 
 
THE 
 
 APOLOGY OF HIPPOLYTUS, 
 
 ADDRESSED TO 
 
 THE PEOPLE OF ENGLAND. 
 
 A SPEECH 
 
 DELIVERED 
 
 IN LONDON, BEFORE A COI^IPANY OF FRIENDS, 
 
 ON THE IDES OF AUGUST, MDCCCLI. 
 
 BEING THE 
 
 ANNIVERSARY OF THE DEPOSITION OF THE REMAINS OF 
 
 SAINT HU'POLVTUS IN THE CATACOMBS OF THE AOER VERANUS, 
 
 ON THE TIBURTINE ROAD, 
 
 ONE THOUSAND SIX HCNDRED AND SIXTEEN YEARS 
 AFTER HIS MARTVRDOM. 
 
 S 4 
 
THE 
 
 APOLOGY OY HIPPOLYTUS. 
 
 I CAN assure you, my Christian Friends and my enlightened 
 Judges, it is with the greatest diffidence that I venture to ad- 
 dress you in my own defence, and claim your protection and 
 interference. Not that I have any misgiving as to your justice 
 and fairness, when you know the real state of the case : nor is 
 the case in itself a difficult one ; but it is prejudged. My book 
 has been taken away from me, because the very existence of a 
 Roman Hippolytus is doubted ; and I am thought an apocry- 
 phal person, because, most of my other works being lost, this, 
 which bears so unequivocal a proof of my having been a Roman, 
 is said to be written by any one rather than by me. In like 
 manner, my book is not studied, because it seems doubtful who 
 wrote it ; and the authorship is doubtful, merely because it is 
 not studied. There are other and deeper reasons for my diffi- 
 dence, which I will tell you by and by. 
 
 Under these circumstances, I know of no better way than to 
 throw myself upon your indulgence, and to tell you with Chris- 
 tian frankness what has happened to me. I want encouragement 
 at your hands ; for I am a stranger and an ill-used man, and I 
 feel perplexed and despondent. 
 
 Some time ago the Spirit moved me to go to Lugdunum, once 
 the seat of my blessed master Irenaeus, in order to examine on 
 the spot the strange stories I had heard of his flock, and of the 
 doctrine of his successor, now member of that same body of 
 suburban bishops and parish priests and deacons of Rome, to 
 which I once belonged. But hearing that my book, the work 
 of my life, had been published here as the composition of Origen, 
 1 hastened to this country. 
 
266 THE APOLOGY OF HIPPOLYTUS. 
 
 Now, consider first wliat interest I have at stake in this cause. 
 I appear before you to reclaim my property, that is to say, all I 
 ever possessed, save and except my good conscience. For when 
 I speak of my property, I mean, not only the book which I wrote 
 with great labour, and out of love to God-loving men, such as 
 you are, but also my reputation as a scholar and learned divine ; 
 and last, though not least, my good Christian name in history. 
 And the reason of all this is, that my very existence as a pres- 
 byter at Rome and as bishop of Portus is questioned, or rather 
 given up altogether, in this country at least. It is doubted 
 whether I, Hippolytus, ever was bishop of Portus and lived at 
 Rome; and I am doomed to hear these doubts thrown out, after 
 having led a long, and not only a laborious, but also a highly 
 honoured, life in the city which was then the metropolis of the 
 world, and in the midst of inquisitive foreigners flowing to Portus 
 from the East and West ; after having enjoyed a literary repu- 
 tation unequalled in my Church, and after having sealed my faith 
 by confessing Christ during a cruel persecution. 
 
 So much for the paramount importance of the case to myself. 
 Then look at the injustice and partiality which apparently have 
 been shown in the proceedings. An ingenious man comes from 
 the Gauls, and requests a very learned body of men to allow a 
 book discovered by him to be printed by the press of the uni- 
 versity under Origen's name. Now, had they read the book, 
 these men, I think, could not have helped seeing that it must 
 have been written at Rome, and by a man in authority resident 
 there. Moreover Origen, my illustrious Alexandrian friend, 
 never said that he had composed a book with such a title, or 
 on such a subject ; nor has any body else ever said it of him, so 
 far as I can learn. On the other hand, all the ancient authors 
 and records of ecclesiastical history which have come down to you 
 name me, I am assured, as the author of a work with that title; 
 and one of them gives you a pretty good account of it. Those 
 learned men, therefore, knowing, of course, all this, ought in 
 fairness, as it appears to me, to have called upon the ingenious 
 Celt to prove to them why they should believe an unknown, and 
 probably ignorant copyist, rather than all the records of an- 
 tiquity, and their own impartial judgment. But they did 
 
STATES HIS GRIEVANCE. 267 
 
 nothing of the sort. For, to judge from the preface which the 
 editor has prefixed to this book in the language of the Romans, 
 either they did not ask him to satisfy their minds on this point, 
 or he satisfied them with reasons known to himself, but unknown 
 to the rest of the world, and to me certainly quite impenetrable 
 Now I do not quarrel with them for this exceeding courtesy 
 towards the Gallic editor. But I do not find the same extended 
 to myself. On the contrary, whenever I come forward and put 
 in my claim as Hippolytus, presbyter of the Church of Rome 
 and bishop of Portus, they say, I am not one person, but two 
 or three, and nobody knows who and what I am. 
 
 Still I was not discouraged at first. I said, these men will 
 judge such a case as men of the law, according to law. 1 have 
 in my favour two clear principles of that Roman civil law, which, 
 I understand, almost all nations have followed, and acknowledge 
 at least as ratio sci'ipta, that is, common sense put in writing. 
 Now, I said, they will, I am sure, think it fair to judge the case 
 of a Roman Father by the principles of the Roman law. Con- 
 sequently they will acknowledge the jus postliminii, according to 
 which a Roman is allowed to return to his home without any 
 further proof of his right : why, then, should not I in this 
 manner claim my former existence ? Besides, as a Roman, I 
 further say, Ubi invenio vindico, Where I find my property 
 I seize it ; leaving the man in whose possession I fiud it to 
 recover damages, if he can, from him who made it over to him. 
 
 Seeing, however, that they would not accept the principles 
 of Roman jurisprudence, I addressed them as scholars and 
 divines. Accordingly, I am ready, I said, to give you a full 
 account of the book, and to show you that I have referred in 
 it to other acknowledged works of mine : and, if you listen to 
 me, you will soon understand that I must have written it (as I 
 was universally said to have done), and that nobody at that time 
 could have thought of writing it, except myself. Now what 
 answer did they give me to this ? They said, they would rather, 
 as English custom allowed them to do, move the previous ques- 
 tion, and first satisfy their minds that there was a man of that 
 name, bishop of Portus and presbyter of Rome, nay, whether 
 at that time there was any Hippolytus in the Western Church, 
 
268 THE APOLOGY OF HIPPOLYTUS. 
 
 or, if so, whether there were not more than one. You maintain 
 unequivocally (they added) that you were bishop of Portus near 
 Rome, and lived at Rome : you therefore leave us no power of 
 saying on your behalf that you might possibly be Hippolytus, 
 and even the author of this work, but that you lived in Arabia. 
 You are determined to be a Roman, and a bishop and a pres- 
 byter at the same time : and we must demur to this for more 
 than one reason. 
 
 Hereupon, I said to myself, if this had happened at Rome, I 
 should have called it not dealing quite fairly with a Father, who 
 surely ought to have some presumption of his existence in his 
 favour : at all events there is in it none of that courtesy which 
 has been shown towards the Gallic editor. 
 
 Still I feel I should have overcome these difficulties, if the 
 cause had not been prejudged more than a hundred years ago. 
 It is not the mistake of this Frenchman that has prejudiced the 
 minds of those learned men of yours against me. There are 
 many among them, who are fully convinced that Origen neither 
 wrote the book nor could have written it. But why is this con- 
 viction of no avail to me ? Alas! there is an old calumny against 
 me, originating in a hasty word altered by a learned Protestant 
 writer, which unfortunately was taken up by some celebrated 
 French priest of that time. And, again, that hasty word (which 
 at the beginning I could not understand) is the consequence of 
 more than a thousand years of lies. For, soon after I died, people 
 began to make of my simple but true story a poetical but lying 
 legend, upon which in the barbarous ages every one improved 
 as he pleased. Learned rogues wrote silly or deceitful books 
 under my name, and learned fools believed them to be genuine. 
 Thus it came to pass, that the learned men of those countries 
 where I once lived, being disabled from dealing honestly with his- 
 torical truth, and from calhng a fable a fable and a lie a lie, tried 
 to reconcile all the nursery-tales and fictions which had been 
 brought forward and credited during those dark ages. This, 
 as you see, was simply betraying truth ; for you cannot believe 
 fables, without disbelieving the truth to which they are opposed. 
 Thus, by laying down that there must have been two or three 
 Hippolytuscs, they lost the only real Hippolytus : and T am he.. 
 
STATES niS GRIEVANCE. 269 
 
 Who can tell which was which ? said one person. But another 
 said, he had a guess. There might he some truth in the old 
 report, that the Hippoljtus who lived in the time of Alexander 
 Severus was bishop of Portus : for almost all the authors who 
 mentioned him, said so. But why should not this be Aden in 
 Arabia, which was called the Port of the Romans, or the Roman 
 Port ? This man of course did not advert to the circumstance, 
 that my home was never so called, but unequivocally the Port 
 of Rome, or Portus near Rome : still less did he mind all the 
 absurdities he involved himself in by compounding between 
 truth and fable, or the doubt which he threw upon history. 
 
 So said those Gallic priests, about 150 years ago. Not long- 
 afterwards came an English divine, and made the matter worse. 
 He positively asserted, as if it were a settled point, that I was a 
 native of Arabia, and a bishop of that remote Eastern country, 
 and that this was all any one could know about me personally. 
 Now he certainly was a very learned man, and a dean besides : 
 and he enjoys in this country so high a reputation, that it is to 
 his book, I understand, that those in your country, who want to 
 know what people once thought on these subjects of ancient 
 Christian criticism, now recur. However that may be, it is clear 
 that what has prejudged my case is not what the Gallic editor 
 has said, but that old unconscionable judgment, based upon a 
 conjecture ; and that this conjecture again was based upon 
 fables and lies, which sprang from a neglect of true historical 
 criticism, and from a want of faith in truth, not to say a con- 
 tempt of truth. 
 
 Now I ask you, whether, with all my feeling of my innocence, 
 and with all my confidence in your natural fairness, I can be 
 very hopeful of success. I have chosen this day as being my 
 anniversary, and as having been celebrated thus^ by many a 
 Christian soul, for more than sixteen centuries : and I should 
 like you to listen to me through a good part of it with attention. 
 But you have no time. At the utmost, you can only give me 
 two hours — two short hours, to undo the work of centuries, to 
 remove unfavourable opinions so deeply rooted in the minds of 
 your learned men, to counteract the effect of a verdict invested 
 in their eyes with the sanction of ages, and to overcome, what is 
 
2V0 THE ArOLOGY OF HIPPOLYTUS. 
 
 my most formidable enemy, your indifference ! Instead of being 
 taken on my word for what I am recorded to be, I am expected 
 to prove my own existence, as being the real and only Hippo- 
 lytus, the bishop of Portus and the presbyter of Rome and the 
 author of this book, for which in particular I am come to claim 
 your protection. But, to speak the truth with Christian siiice- 
 I'ity, you do not care whether I exist or not, nor what I said or 
 said not. For the truth of this frank assertion, and the justice 
 of my complaint of hardship, let me appeal to yourselves. I 
 know, you are enlightened, and generally well informed men ; 
 and many of you deeply read in ecclesiastical antiquity. But, 
 first, have you not come to this place with a vague notion that I 
 am an apocryphal person ? Now you must have a misgiving 
 about trusting an apocryphal man with a disputed authorship. 
 You might endanger the authority of a book declared authentic 
 and important, and your own hkewise. Besides, I fear, many 
 of you are come to this place with a feeling that it is of no great 
 consequence what the truth of the matter may be at last. 
 
 Such being my case, I hope, during the two short hours al- 
 lowed for my defence, you will listen to me attentively, as being 
 a deeply injured man, and that, hearing me for the first time on 
 this day, you will not be satisfied till you have sifted my case 
 thoroughly. Above all, I trust you will not forget that we are 
 searching for truth, for historical and rehgious truth ; and I can 
 prove to you that the case you have to investigate is connected 
 with the most important subjects on which it is given to man to 
 meditate, and last, not least, with your highest practical interests. 
 I claim no copyright ; I appeal to no point of law ; I call upon you 
 to investigate trutli, and truth very important for your present 
 and future wellbeing. 
 
 I have not concealed from you the weighty causes of my diffi- 
 dence, which sometimes grows into despondency. But I should 
 be more sorry still, if I had to fear you would imagine that this 
 despondency is founded upon any doubt as to your competency 
 for finding out the truth, or as to your justice towards strangers. 
 I know that you possess all the means requisite for investigating 
 a historical fact, and for distinguishing between good and bad 
 evidence. I know, besides, that you are the fairest of men, kind 
 
ADDRESSES HIMSELF TO ENGEISH FAIRNESS. 271 
 
 to foreigners, and generous to all who in distress appeal to you. 
 My only misgiving is this, that, having for a long time deferred 
 all these questions and inquiries to some learned bodies, one of 
 which is apparently inclined the other way, and having, in the 
 midst of so many more practical avocations, no time and little 
 inclination to trouble yourselves about what the old Fathers said 
 or did or were, you may decline to judge my case, as one which 
 ought to be judged by those whose office it is to read the old 
 Fathers. 
 
 Hear, then, my reasons, why it is by you, my Christian 
 Friends, that I wish to be judged in preference to all others. 
 My case is a very simple one, if you divest it of theological terms 
 and subtleties. To be well understood, all that it demands is, 
 that spirit of fairness, and that common sense, for which all na- 
 tions give you credit, and for which I see you are indeed entitled 
 to be praised. I perceive that whatever you really care for, and 
 take in hand as a nation, you soon master, however difficult the 
 task may be ; and then handle it with great wisdom and superior 
 judgment, and carry out your decision with unrivalled energy 
 and perseverance. I have traversed Romanized Gaul, and seen 
 learned but distracted Germany. In both countries I have met 
 with much to admire and praise : but in that which must depend 
 upon practical wisdom and judgment, I have found nothing 
 worthy to be compared to your national doings. I have seen 
 your shores, and your magnificent river with the forest of masts 
 upon it, leaving far behind it all I ever beheld in sailing up the 
 Tiber from Portus to imperial Rome ; I have admired the great 
 palaces and domes along its banks ; I have wandered through this 
 metropolis, larger and more populous than Rome ever was; and, 
 finally, I have beheld the Crystal Palace, which is not unequal 
 to the vast buildings raised from time to time on the Campus 
 Martius, and that display of peaceful art and industry, which 
 exhibits so striking a contrast to our shows of military trophies 
 and our bloody games in the amphitheatre. Yet I confess to 
 you with perfect sincerity, that, though I do justice to such 
 works, to your cities and your churches, your iron roads and 
 
272 THE APOLOGY OF HirPOLYTUS. 
 
 your steaming ships, there is something which I admire much 
 more than all this ; because I have always thought the cause 
 more worthy of admiration than the effect, and held the moving 
 principle higher than any special manifestation and application 
 of it. What I admire most among you, is what I consider to 
 be your great and lasting monument in the history of the world. 
 You have created a commonwealth, where two things are united 
 which that great pagan, Tacitus, thought irreconcilable, liberty 
 and government. And if I search into the nature, origin, and 
 growth of this your commonwealth, I find it to be the fruit of 
 true Christian principles, of Christian self-government and 
 mercy. All that striking order and energy which reign in this 
 country, all the wisdom and zeal of your senators and areopa- 
 gitic judges, the general respect for the law among the people, 
 as well as all those great and mighty external works which 
 people admire so much, seem to me to originate in your truly 
 public, and, let me say, Christian spirit. For Christianity is 
 intended to establish law and self-government, first in every 
 individual, next in domestic life, and in public society. Chris- 
 tianity is to convince people of the eternal love of God, and 
 to make them love their fellow-creatures as brethren, in order 
 to enable them, through such love, to erect a godlike, rational, 
 and just, and consequently a free commonwealth. Wherever, 
 therefore, I find the forms of public liberty, I inquire first, 
 whether the people have the law in themselves ; whether there 
 be in them, individually, liberty, which is self-government, and 
 charity, which is mutual faith : and where I find that to be the 
 case, I know from history and my own experience that it is the 
 work of Christianity. Now with you this is so, evidently. 
 
 And this reminds me of the strange words which I was 
 obliged to hear from the present successor of the blessed 
 Irenasus ^ when I told him, after a short visit, that I intended 
 to go to England and to live some time among you. " I beg 
 your pardon," he said, " for speaking thus freely to one, who 
 asserts himself to be, and who (I am most willing to believe) is, 
 not only a colleague of mine, a cardinal, but also as such is so 
 infinitely my senior, and stands before me indisputably as the 
 Dean of the Sacred College.^ But I must confess to you, that. 
 
WHAT HE ADMIRES MOST IN ENGLAND. 273 
 
 after all that has come to pass in that'island during these last three 
 hundred years, and all that they have done lately to a colleague 
 of ours, it appears strange to me that you should wish to go to 
 England. You say you are anxious to know what these Pro- 
 testants really are ; and I understand you were always very 
 inquisitive : but you have only to look at what they did in the 
 ages when their priests were united with us, and to compare it 
 with what they have achieved since their separation, during 
 these last three hundred years, in order to know what to think 
 of their Christianity. The ages in which our Churches were 
 united produced among them saints like yourself, and covered 
 the face of their country with magnificent temples; but since 
 they separated from us, what have they given to the world 
 save money-making men of business, and egotistical statesmen, 
 and what have they reared except factories and cotton-mills ? "' 
 Then he went on exalting all that the great Roman Catholic 
 nations had done, and lamenting how low you were sunk ; and 
 finally he tried to frighten me by saying, he knew through his 
 infallible reporters and their friends in high places, that the 
 Exhibition would be the signal for revolution and murder. 
 
 But, doubting much of what he said, I persisted in my re- 
 solution, and came over to your country. And here I see that 
 you have indeed erected most wonderful factories and cotton- 
 mills ; but you do not make the poor people, men and women 
 and cliildren, work in them on Sundays, as the Gauls do in their 
 country. You have, like them, labourers and mechanics, aspir- 
 ing to better their condition ; but yours prefer working, and 
 quietly associating together, to the making of revolutions, and 
 plunging others and themselves into misery. You have ragged 
 children : but you clothe and educate them for useful work, 
 instead of enlisting them as soldiers to kill their fellow-citizens ; 
 and they like learning to read and to work, rather than making 
 an attempt to convulse society by their votes, and to subvert 
 order by arms. Your metropolis is not a monumental town, 
 like a part of theirs : but your monument is your common- 
 wealth. I must apply to you as a nation, what you say in your 
 great basilica on the tomb of the great architect who raised it: 
 " Si monumenium reqviris circumspice." You have raised, in 
 
 VOL. II. T 
 
274 THE APOLOGY OF HIPPOLYTUS. 
 
 tliose three hundred years, that well-balanced commonwealth to 
 which I have already alluded, and you have established and 
 maintained such a sanctuary of liberty as even our fathers did 
 not possess in the great and glorious times of the Republic. 
 You have known how to unite freedom with order, popular 
 rights with a national aristocracy and hereditary monarchy, 
 which union, our great heathen prophet Cicero said, would, if 
 ever it could be brought to pass, form the most perfect of govern- 
 ments.^ This great monument, which you have erected, I admire 
 more than all those outer works of civilization of which other 
 people think you are so proud, not only as men of your race, 
 but as Christians, and, I am bound to add, as Protestants. You 
 have just shown to the world the practical effect of the principle 
 on which your social arrangements are based. People on the 
 Continent believed (or tried to make others believe) that the 
 gathering of so many hundreds of thousands of your working 
 and labouring men round the spectacle of the Great Exhibition 
 would be the signal, if not of famine and pestilence, certainly of 
 revolution and bloodshed. But I have seen them surround their 
 queen with respectful affection : and, far from any disturbance 
 taking place, good-will and good-humour and plenty never have 
 reigned more paramount any where than during these months 
 among you. Now when I ask myself, how long you have pos- 
 sessed this liberty and enjoyed this peace and tranquillity, I 
 cannot help remarking that you owe it all to that godly reform 
 you began to make of Christianity about three hundred years 
 ago. Nor is this an isolated instance : for I find that more or 
 less it is so everywhere ; and I know only too well what I have 
 seen in France, and what I have credibly heard here of the state 
 of my native country. In framing your Constitution, you have 
 only applied with consistency and success to politics the great 
 principle of Protestantism, namely, self-responsibility. For 
 liberty is self-government, and self-government is impossible 
 without the principle of moral self-responsibility being the 
 active popular principle of faith. The great work of your 
 Reformation is the State herself, and the progress of society 
 by reform, and not by revolution, and this I find prevalent 
 only in Protestant countries. 
 
FEARS ONLY ENGLISH INDIFFERENCE. 275 
 
 This, then, being the impression your nation and country 
 have made upon me, you cannot doubt of my entire confidence 
 in your competency as well as in your justice. Every thing- 
 seems to depend upon this, whether I succeed in overcoming 
 your disheartening indifference, and in interesting you in the 
 truth involved in my case. I have a hope I shall succeed, as 
 soon as you convince yourselves that it is not so much my per- 
 sonal case, as that of truth, and therefore your own ; as soon as 
 you perceive how intimately it is connected with the earliest 
 development of that pure evangelical faith, to which you cling 
 witli such instinctive earnestness and ardour. 
 
 My only difficulty, then, at last, is that you have no time for 
 such matters. I confess that there are many circumstances 
 which inspire me with hope also on this point. For you have 
 evidently become more aware in these latter times than you 
 were before, that it is necessary for you to take the religious 
 question, the question of your faith, into your own hands; and 
 I know that, as soon as you do this, you will follow up all those 
 studies and inquiries with which I and my book are connected, 
 and about which I must speak to you in my defence. 
 
 But still, as matters stand at present, those whose good 
 opinions I am desirous of deserving, and whom I wish to stir 
 up to some common inquiry respecting the past, present, and 
 future, think very little of us, the old Fathers, and least of all 
 of me, whom their learned men in authority have given up, and 
 struck, as it were, out of their memory. This indifference on 
 the part of your truly learned men frightens me much more 
 than all their attacks and criticisms, past and future. I can 
 say with perfect sincerity that I shall consider it a great honour, 
 if your men of learning criticize me at all ; and I shall be grateful 
 to them if they show me the defects and faults of my writings 
 and of my age. For this is the right of the younger and the 
 duty of the wiser. Only do not kill my cause by indifference. 
 All I require from them is, that they sift my case, and above 
 all read my book. I am sure my works, and I myself per- 
 sonally, might have something to tell even to your most learned 
 people. When I meet them privately, I say to myself, it would 
 be preposterous to suppose I could equal such men in knowledge, 
 
 T 2 
 
276 THE APOLOGY OF HIPPOLYTUS. 
 
 wherever they choose to employ their leisure and means of in- 
 formation. But still, in my time we knew something, and I 
 was thought a great luminary, and certainly laboured much to 
 make my fellow Christians equal the heathen in learning and 
 thought, as they surpassed them in virtue and piety. Following 
 up this idea, and thinking how kind they are to foreigners, I 
 perceived a ray of hope in the midst of my despondency. And 
 being thus a little comforted, I felt the blood of a martyr rush 
 back to my heart, and I said to myself, I will take courage. I 
 am put on my defence ; and however little I may have known, 
 and much as I may fall short of their divines and philosophers 
 in learning, I know who I am, and that I have written my own 
 book ; I also trust I know something of Christ and of the Scrip- 
 tures, of Christian thought and of Christian life. And after all, 
 am I not among a people known over the whole world as models 
 of fairness? If they have shown, as everybody allows, the 
 strictest impartiality in the difficult task they had undertaken, 
 of being at the same time, like the Eleans of old, among the 
 competitors and among the judges in the Olympic contests, how 
 should they not do so in my case ? Above all, since they are 
 Christian brethren, loving Christ, his disciples and followers, 
 how should they not care for me and judge me fairly "i 
 
 These considerations, as they gave me great comfort at the 
 time, so they now inspire me with cheerful thoughts, with con- 
 fidence and hope. I feel, at this moment, sure that you will 
 give me a patient hearing ; and I promise you to be as short as 
 possible. I will simply tell you what has passed in our aca- 
 demical disputations. Appreciating the manifold disadvantages 
 under which I labour, you will, I am certain, forgive the im- 
 perfections of my style, and put the most favourable construction 
 upon my words. You cannot expect me, a foreigner, to be 
 perfect in English idioms, or to know your English forms. I 
 have taken as my model Plato's Apology of Socrates, because I 
 always tried, although very imperfectly, to imitate his style, and 
 to employ the Socratic method as well as I could. Now all this 
 must appear very quaint and strange to you ; but be persuaded 
 that it is done without affectation. I do so simply because I 
 do not know better. But above all, you must needs believe 
 
TELLS SOMETHING OF HIS OWN LIFE. 277 
 
 that I am not come to accuse your learned divines, but that I 
 stand before you on my defence, and that I do not mean to teach 
 those who are so much wiser than I am, but to instruct myself. 
 If, therefore, you find that in the course of my apology, in 
 answering their doubts, and in endeavouring to remove their 
 difficulties, I have taken the liberty of asking them a question 
 or two in my turn, I hope you will not consider this too great 
 a liberty, but believe that this method proceeds merely from an 
 earnest desire to improve my stock of knowledge during the 
 time that I have the happiness of living amongst you. More- 
 over, if in these answers or questions of mine I may appear to 
 have intended to place some puzzles and riddles before them, 
 pray do not think that I delight in paradoxes; but rather 
 believe that I give you only the substance of our conversations, 
 because it is my wish not to be too tedious at the first hearing 
 you grant me, and that I desire to establish a connection with 
 you, which may lead at some future time to more explicit friendly 
 communing between us. 
 
 Having thus taken courage to speak frankly to you, and feeling- 
 persuaded that you will listen to me with patient attention, I 
 will enter at once upon my defence. 
 
 Here you will perhaps fear that I intend to hiy before you 
 black-letter records and intricate arguments, in order to prove 
 that I, Hippolytus, was bishop of Portus, and member of the 
 governing presbytery at Rome, and that, as such, I wrote the 
 " Refutation of all the Heresies." 
 
 Now I do not intend troubling you with any such proofs. It 
 appears to me absurd that I should be called upon to prove that 
 I am myself; and it makes my head quite giddy to think that 
 it is doubtful whether I am that author. Not understanding 
 anything of the strange stories they so early invented about me, 
 but knowing that they are false, I can with difficulty imagine 
 how men, so wise and enlightened, should ever have arrived at 
 such wild notions and such almost incredible scepticism. A 
 
 T 3 
 
278 THE APOLOGY OF HIPPOLYTUS. 
 
 German friend undertook the other day to explain all this to 
 me, and tried to make me comprehend all the strong arguments 
 which he can bring forward from my book itself, and the good 
 evidence which he has collected from the ancient records about 
 me. I confess that I could not help pitying him for having 
 been obliged to go through so much inquiry, and you for wanting 
 such a circumstantial demonstration in order to believe a fact 
 which ought never to have been doubted. Be sure therefore of 
 this : I will not say a word on this subject ; but I will tell you 
 some particulars about Portus and my domestic life in that place, 
 which must prove to you that 1 lived there, and which will show 
 you how I lived. 
 
 I know nothing of that Roman port which they say existed 
 in Arabia, and whither they want to send me into exile. But 
 I know Portus, the harbour, as it were the Piraeus, of Rome. 
 You are all acquainted with Ostia, the ancient mouth of the 
 Tiber ; and many among you, I dare say, have visited the Holy 
 Island, with its shore of little more than two miles in length from 
 one outlet of the muddy river to the other. Indeed it is from 
 you I have learned how that same island, in my time covered 
 with roses and called a paradise, and crowded by the almost 
 adjoining buildings of Ostia and of Portus, is now a barren spot, 
 haunted by wild buffaloes, and used as a place of transportation, 
 like Sardinia of old. As to Portus itself, they tell me the place 
 bears the old name, but is now no longer a harbour; there is 
 still a pond, I hear, with a few huts round it, constructed, as 
 well as the house of the bishop, which they style a palace, from 
 the ruins of temples and theatres, quays and piers, which place 
 they call Porto, meaning Portus. But I know old Portus. I 
 recollect that on the natural outlet at Ostia having become 
 shallow and impracticable for shipping, one of our early em- 
 perors, I forget whether Claudius or Trajan, cut a canal some 
 miles above, which took in a part of the water of the river, and 
 conducted it to a deep and costly basin, surrounded by ware- 
 houses, and open to the sea. A flourishing borough had in 
 consequence risen around this new port ; and the place, called 
 Portus, became very populous. All ships came there ; and all 
 the nations who traded with Rome had their warehouses and 
 
HIS LIFE AT PORTUS. 279 
 
 their cluL-liouses and their sanctuaries at Portus. Being by 
 origin a Greek, speaking Greek as my native tongue, and having 
 studied under Irena?us, who taught in Greek, I was considered 
 by the presbytery at Rome and the congregation at Portus to 
 be a proper person to go thither, in spite of the neighbourhood 
 of the city of Ostia. For Greek was the medium, not only of 
 common conversation at the Harbour, but also of religious con- 
 troversy and of worship. I became instrumental there in doing- 
 good. The foreigners liked me ; and I was called the Bishop 
 of the Nations. Indeed, I preferred living and conversing with 
 any of them to disputing and living with the Jews. I was a 
 bishop, with the same right as the bishop of Ostia, my neighbour 
 and bi'other, whose title was older, and who took precedence of 
 me in the presbytery at Rome, but who had little to inspect and 
 to govern, whereas I was really the bishop of the foreigners 
 coming to Rome. By becoming the rector, and therefore the 
 bishop of the Harbour, I did not cease to be a presbyter at 
 Rome, our metropolis, with which we were all connected. 
 Why should I not be both at the same time ? 
 
 As to my domestic life, it was certainly very unlike what I 
 have seen the successor of Irenasus lead at Lugdunum. I had 
 no court around me; but I had a wife and children, the very 
 mention of which startled that priest, and those about him, 
 whom he called canons. But you, feeling so blessed in your 
 homes, and leading, as far as I can see, very generally, clergy 
 as well as laity, a happy family life, will sympathise with me in 
 what I am going to tell you on this subject.*' 
 
 It was at Portus that I married ; and there I lost my ever 
 beloved and only wife, Chloe, the faithful and zealous assistant 
 in what I may call, not only my parochial, but my missionary 
 labours in that noisy port. Her memory is for ever connected 
 with that place. Probably my biographers have not told you, 
 that she was the sister of that rich and influential man. Heron, 
 for a long time my opponent and my rival, as sacristan and 
 fanatical patron of the gaudy and deceitful temple of Serapis at 
 Portus, near the Egyptian warehouse.^ Let me at all events 
 tell you with humble thankfulness, my labours were at length 
 crowned with success, so that I became instrumental in convert - 
 
 T 4 
 
280 THE APOLOGY OF HIPPOLYTUS. 
 
 ing him to the saving faith of Christ. These were the happiest 
 days of my life. But alas ! in the next summer I lost Chloe, 
 in consequence of a fatal fever. My own health having suffered 
 much, I was prevailed upon to reside at Rome. There my 
 bitter controversies began ; and my domestic bereavement 
 became complete. In the month of August in the following 
 year I had to weep over the corpse"of my beloved son Anteros. 
 He also fell a victim to the fever, having caught it in bishop 
 Callistus' house in the Jews' quarter, on the other side of the 
 Tiber, near the old bridge, whither I had sent him with a 
 message connected with our angry discussions and disputes.* 
 
 Thus much about myself. You know me now personally. 
 If you wish to know more of me, read my books, and more 
 particularly the one which they have stolen from me. 
 
 I therefore think I act fairly towards myself, as well as you, 
 by assuming my own historical existence, as bishop of Portus 
 and presbyter at Rome, as well as my authorship as regards the 
 book in question. Read it, and then ask me any questions you 
 like, and see whether I can answer them, and whether my 
 answers are not such as Hippolytus, who is known to the 
 literary world, might have been expected to give. Let Origen 
 and his friends enjoy the full copyright (for they tell me that 
 this in your country is a very serious matter) : I claim only the 
 authorship, and the right to demand that the title of the 
 publication be changed. 
 
 Having said thus much about myself personally, I proceed at 
 once to the principal point, which is my reputation as a scholar, 
 a philosopher, a divine, and a Christian. I must treat all these 
 questions separately, one after the other. As you have a right 
 to know what has passed between my learned friends in this 
 country and myself, I think, as I said before, the shortest as 
 well as fairest method will be, to confine myself to relating the 
 substance of our discussions, so far as to enable you to study 
 the case yourselves, and then give your verdict. 
 
MAINTAINS THE AUTHORITY OF SCRIPTURE. 281 
 
 Here I must, first of all, give you an account of a discussion 
 on a preliminary point, and a rather ticklish one to settle, which 
 is absolutely necessary for my defence, and for the vindication 
 of my character as a scholar and divine. 
 
 In the very outset of my theological discussions in this 
 country on the interpretation of the Scriptures, I found it very 
 difficult to come to a right understanding on the question 
 respecting the text of the sacred volume. 
 
 I soon agreed with my Christian friends, when speaking of 
 matters of faith, to take the Holy Scriptures as our common 
 basis. For, as I have said in my treatise against Noetus, with- 
 out them we should know absolutely nothing^ ; and I can fairly 
 say, that in teaching I have ever declared the Scriptures un- 
 equivocally to be the only source of our revealed knowledge of 
 things divine, and of the thought and will of God towards man. 
 This principle I have maintained through life ; and on this 
 basis I combated the Gnostic subtleties. You may imagine, 
 therefore, how entirely I agree with your nation, and with the 
 Protestant part of your clergy, on this fundamental point. I 
 have indeed maintained metaphysical points, and opposed 
 philosophical opinions on speculative grounds ; but only because 
 the first were, to my mind, necessary or reasonable corollaries 
 from explicit passages of Scripture, and because, on the other 
 hand, those philosophical opinions were in direct opposition to 
 the same. Now, as I thought the Scriptures the basis of our 
 faith, I exhorted the people to read, and tried to help them to 
 understand, what the Bible contains of the word of God. 
 Much, therefore, do I approve and admire your zeal in render- 
 ing the Scriptures accessible to all nations ; because I am sure 
 this zeal for printing and distributing Bibles is equalled by 
 your more intellectual and effective efforts in instructing the 
 young and the ignorant to understand them, and in preaching 
 the joyful message to all nations by the mouth of evangelists. 
 Having touched upon this point, let me tell you how much I 
 admiie the English version of the Scriptures, which seems to 
 me, on the whole, most intelligible and most faithCul, living too 
 in the affections of your nation, and its very words interwoven 
 with your thoughts and speech. 
 
282 THE APOLOGY OF HIPPOLYTU8. 
 
 But it seemed to me that something more was required for 
 historical discussion. Here we meet on neutral ground. We 
 must recur to the very words of the original sacred text ; and 
 there it is that I feel embarrassed even now. 
 
 As to the text of the Old Testament, I, like my brethren, 
 used the Alexandrian version of the Jews ; and I feel myself 
 open to censure for not going back to the Hebrew original. 
 Let me, therefore, at once confess to you that I never was 
 a Hebrew scholar, although I knew more about the Hebrew 
 than those around me. But I dare say the learned men who 
 criticize and judge me are very great scholars in that language. 
 As they are so particular in points of infinitely minor import- 
 ance, and so profound in the criticism of the heathen writers, 
 both Greeks and Latins, I feel certain they must be much more 
 so in whatever belongs to the critical and philological under- 
 standing of the sacred text. Know, then, that I feel my 
 weakness on this point, "and that it is my firm purpose as soon 
 as I shall have vindicated my character and authorship, and 
 have paid a farewell visit to Rome and to Portus, to come to 
 you and sit down in the shade of your Academies, and ask you 
 many questions about the perplexities which I could not solve 
 in my time, nor Irenaeus in his. I feel only too deeply that we 
 were all much in the dark about this point, but most particularly 
 about the prophecies, which I understand your people handle 
 with such admirable readiness, and apply with certainty even to 
 these times. Of the Hebrew text, therefore, I say nothing but 
 this: — happy you who are able to read and to interpret it as 
 good critical and Hebrew scholars ; for we all of us knew very 
 little about it. 
 
 But I come now to my difficulty respecting the original text 
 of the New Testament. How is it that you do not read the same 
 text which we had in our time ? Ours was one delivered to us 
 from the elders, and, as we thought, from the blessed Apostles 
 and from the Apostolic writers ; and I never heard of any con- 
 siderable difference among the Churches of the East and West 
 on this point. But, as I was going the other day through my 
 doctrinal works with one of your countrymen, he, being a learned 
 and, what is more, a sincere man, took me to task for some of 
 
THINKS HE READ A BETTER GREEK TEXT. 283 
 
 my quotations. He said that they were not correct, and that, with 
 reference to the text of the first verses of St. John's Gospel, I 
 did not understand the conniionest rules of punctuation.'" This 
 very naturally made a deep impression on my mind. " You are 
 a wise man indeed," I said to him ; " and you will help me out 
 of a great difficulty, if you will tell me whence you got your 
 text, of which you speak with so much confidence. I have told 
 you what our authorities were ; and it is difficult for me to 
 understand how later changes can have improved an old text, or 
 of what great importance it can be to know the different ways 
 in which subsequent copyists disfigured and interpolated the 
 texts read by the Fathers, when the old texts agree so well 
 among themselves. So I thought : but how was I humbled 
 (and, I confess, puzzled too) when my learned friend told me, 
 that two booksellers, the one a Gaul, and the other a Batavian, 
 had manufactured that text for you from avowedly late and 
 discordant manuscripts ; and that, this text having been received 
 by the people who bought those copies, and made them and 
 their reprints general school-books, it was thought neither re- 
 verent nor profitable to discuss that question in this country. 
 Be this as it may, he concluded by saying, " What is printed 
 is printed : and you, as a foreigner, must accept the text as we 
 offer it to you." 
 
 Now my first thought was something like this : " What per- 
 plexing people these islanders are ! They have undoubtedly an 
 esoteric and reserved doctrine, as well as an exoteric and 
 popular one, although they do not avow it. For they them- 
 selves possess a most beautiful manuscript of high antiquity, and 
 while reading it the other day, I found exactly all my texts, as 
 I knew them from Irenasus, and from the library belonging to 
 our presbytery in the Jews' quarter, near the place where St. 
 Peter suffered martyrdom. There can be no doubt those 
 learned men know full well that this text, which is the same as 
 the ancient Church read, is the right text. But such is their 
 self-denial, and their respect for what they have received from 
 the two foreign booksellers, that they conceal from the less 
 knowing that they know better. Whatever be their reason for 
 this n)yslcrious reserve, I cannot but admire the self-denial of 
 
284 THE APOLOGY OF HIPPOLYTUS. 
 
 which such reserve must be a proof and an example." So I 
 then said to myself, and so I say now to you. Only let it be 
 fully understood, that, when you in future reason with me upon 
 Greek texts of Scripture, I appeal to your fairness (as I know I 
 must not appeal to my superior knowledge), and beg of you to 
 allow me to keep to that text which we old Christians knew in 
 our time, and to that Scripture which we acknowledged to be 
 canonical, that is to say, Apostolical." 
 
 As to this latter point, I promise not to intrude upon you as 
 canonical a book called the " Apocalypse of St. Peter," which 
 our Roman Apostle and martyr had introduced to be read in 
 our Church, on account of certain striking and graphic passages 
 respecting the past things and future life, which certainly would 
 do no harm. I never quoted it. You will, on your side, kindly 
 abstain from quoting what you call the Second Epistle of St. 
 Peter. I might have been induced to do so, in order to prove 
 my theory about the coming of Antichrist and the end of the 
 world after 6000 years. But I could not in good conscience. 
 The ancient Churches did not know such a letter. I confess, 
 having read it, I like the beginning well ; but the rest seems to 
 me an imitation of the Epistle of Jude, which we considered at 
 Rome as canonical as you do. 
 
 This topic brings me to the first point on which 1 have to 
 defend myself before you. I will summon courage to say some- 
 thing in defence of my allegorical interpretations, which my 
 learned friends in this country generally find so extremely absurd. 
 " How could the old man ever run into such fancies? I am 
 sure he never would, if he had known the full evangelical truth!" 
 said a very respectable clergyman the other day to a friend, in 
 my hearing. I could not sleep the first night after this ; and I 
 begged my interpreter to read me some commentaries of his or 
 of his friends on Daniel and the Apocalypse. For on these two 
 books 1 know I have written with great ignorance : only let it 
 not be forgotten, I have done so, as my work on Antichrist 
 
DISLIKES CERTAIN ArOCALYPTIC DREAMS. 285 
 
 shows, with great diffidence, and never argued against others 
 upon those conjectures and guesses, as I will prove to you 
 shortly. My companion chose, indeed, as he assured me, the 
 best and most pious and learned hooks ever written on the 
 subject ; and he went so ftir as to say they were the books of 
 the age. Certainly I found the authors themselves had no dif- 
 fidence whatever in their method of interpretation ; and this 
 assuredly is something much to be admired. For they were 
 obliged to confess to me, that all similar attempts had proved to 
 be delusions ; and I was able to show that, if there had been any 
 truth in them, the world would have perished half a dozen times 
 over in the last hundred years. " Mark," I said, " at all events 
 this, the predictions based upon that method have hitherto turned 
 out to be quite as unfounded as my much derided and exploded 
 conjectures on the time of the coming of Antichrist. But I confess 
 to you, with great frankness, yours are likely to have the same 
 fate in the next twenty or thirty years, when, I understand, this 
 world must come to an end, according to those enlightened in- 
 terpreters. Which, then, is more likely to perish within that 
 period — the world, or your system? I incline to believe the 
 world will go on, and your interpreters, if any there be, will 
 find no I'eaders in this country. As regards Rome, having heard 
 very little from that quarter since I left this world, I do not 
 know exactly what Callistus' successors may have done there. 
 He was a great tyrant ; and his successors may have been no 
 better than he was : but I certainly think you must be mistaken 
 in believing that St. John's vision of the fall of Rome did not 
 apply to imperial and heathen Rome, but to Christian and Cal- 
 listian Rome. I can assure you, that they who had seen the 
 Apostle, or learnt from those who had seen him (among whom 
 my master was one), never dreamt of doubting that such was the 
 meaning of his words. And I must confess, reading the book 
 now rationally, I find the text does not allow us to apply to 
 your own time predictions connected with events which relate 
 to impei'ial Rome. You may be quite right in saying, that, if 
 the Apostle condemned Nero and his satellites, who tortured and 
 burned the Christians, he must also have condemned popish 
 Rome, as you call it, if it corrupted and oppressed Christianity. 
 
286 THE APOLOGY OF HIPPOLYTUS. 
 
 But then you must also consider, that the Apostle would not 
 have so inveighed against it, because Christian Rome is built 
 upon the site of the heathen city of the seven hills, but because 
 that condemnation is written in the eternal decrees of God 
 against whatever is unholy and corrupt, and stands in the way 
 of the progress of His kingdom, wherever it be. That is an 
 inference, but not an interpretation ; and we were now speaking 
 of interpretation, that is to say, of finding out what the Apostle 
 meant to say about the times and their epochs. I myself in- 
 ferred, in my commentary upon the Apocalypse, that it was 
 quite fair to see in the condemnation of the Jezebel of the 
 Thyatirans an equal condemnation of those conceited and lying 
 Montanist women, who persecuted the saints of the Lord in the 
 same church of Thyatira. But I did not deny that St. John, by 
 that Jezebel, designated a blasphemous woman of his days, and 
 that the details of his book respecting Thyatira applied to the 
 Thyatira of his own time. I only thought, like himself, that 
 one Jezebel is as bad as another. But, let me remind you, I 
 also thought that one Daniel was as good as another. ' Who- 
 ever,' I said in my Antichrist, * resolves not to eat of the food 
 of the intellectual Nebuchadnezzar, and whoever afflicts his soul 
 with fasting in this Babylon here, through the knowledge of the 
 truth, he is Daniel ; and what is told about the Daniel of old 
 will be applicable to him. For both are of one and the same 
 principle, and one and the same habit, so they may both be 
 called Daniel.' " Now, do you not think I had more comfort in 
 this contemplation than I ever could have had, if the period at 
 which the world would come to an end had been really made 
 known to me ? Does the end of the world not come to every 
 one of us at the hour of our death, the time of which is re- 
 stricted within very narrow limits ? Do you know what cured 
 me, even in my lifetime, of my Apocalyptic dreams ? I found 
 out that some of the Montanist women had foretold repeatedly 
 the epochs of external events which came to pass in their time.^^ 
 Now, am I to think for that, I said to myself, that these women 
 have the Holy Spirit in them ? What has the Holy Spirit to 
 do with counting years and months and days ? In His kingdom, 
 the only true and the only divine one, time and space are of a 
 
DOES NOT MIND WHEN DANIEL WAS WRITTEN. 287 
 
 very subordinate importance ; and I should suppose tliat, wTiere- 
 ever He has moved holy men in the Church to say something 
 respecting times, it will be found that the subject of the pro- 
 phecy is not to be wholly external and idealess, but connected 
 with the great thoughts of God, and, finally, that it offers to 
 the mind a certain latitude, and to the individual will and 
 national action all their energy. But even such predictions can 
 only be of a very secondary nature, and, I suppose, subordinate 
 to the fact whether nation or individual concerned does or does 
 not certain good or wicked things. On the contrary, what an 
 inexhaustible treasure of thought and of holy inspiration is there 
 in the idea, that whoever testifies to the truth, and against the 
 tyrant, and despises all the comforts of the body, and offers his 
 life for the defence of truth, is as much Daniel as the historical 
 one ! This contemplation comforted me and many other Chris- 
 tians at that time ; and I will not conceal from you, it also pre- 
 vented me from being startled the other day, when a German 
 tried to prove to me that our bx)ok of Daniel was not written by 
 that pious and wise patriarch of the Jews, whom Hezekiel names 
 between Noah and Job, but by an equally pious and wise, and 
 therefore patriotic and courageous man, who, in the midst 
 of the tyranny of Antiochus Epiphanes, and of the horrors of 
 idolatry, when every word was watched by the spies, every 
 patriotic writing persecuted as a crime, chose this form in 
 order to instil holy courage and undying faith into the hearts of 
 his suffering and almost despairing countrymen. " Well," I said, 
 *' I cannot enter now into this discussion : I must first learn 
 Hebrew, and Hebrew criticism, and the later vernacular idiom 
 of Palestine, which they call Chaldee ; and all that I intend to 
 do at one of your or the English universities as soon as I have 
 leisure. But I do not mind at all, if you prove to me that the 
 thing is so. For truth has after all in itself a paramount value; 
 and if you do not deny that the book is the same as that which 
 our Saviour read, and if you admit also that this intellectual 
 Daniel was a pious and truthful man, uttering the truth whicli 
 was in him by the same spirit which spoke through the holy men 
 before him, that he acted out of self-sacrificing love to God and 
 his brethren, and if you acknowledge as prophetic what he says 
 
288 THE APOLOGY OF HIPPOLYTUS. 
 
 of the final victory of justice and holiness, I do not see why we 
 should be losers, and not infinitely gainers in every respect." 
 
 I find that I am interrupted in my defence by some expres- 
 sions of indignation or surprise. As far as the tumult allows 
 me to understand what is meant, I believe I may refer it to 
 questions like these : " Will you invent and then justify pious 
 fraud ? Should we not give up altogether the character of tlie 
 Bible as a sacred and inspired book, if we admitted such a hy- 
 pothesis ? " 
 
 Now, my friends, do not forget that I have declared my 
 readiness to submit my case to your judgment also in this point, 
 as soon as we shall have studied the matter together. But, at 
 present, let me only ask ; Would it be fair to exclude entirely 
 the free discussion of whether the late origin of Daniel is a hy- 
 pothesis or a fact ? Certainly it would not. But still ask your 
 own conscience whether you do not in fact exclude a fair dis- 
 cussion, if you set down beforehand as a starting point, that it 
 cannot be a fact, because you suppose that it would pre-judge 
 the sacred character of the book and dishonour the Bible. I 
 cannot see the difference between such a proceeding and that of 
 the Roman inquisitors against Galileo, which you always quote 
 against Rome. They maintained that the honour of Scripture 
 depended upon assuming as certain that the philosopher's system 
 must be false : for, they asserted, as the Scripture evidently 
 supposes the sun to move and the earth to stand still, it would 
 be impiety to admit that such a hypothesis could be a fact. 
 You ought at least to go as far as the Jesuits did in the seven- 
 teenth century, when they edited your Newton's " Principia " 
 as a model of ingenuity for rendering plausible a hypothesis 
 which a good Christian, of course, knew beforehand to be wrong. 
 Now it is easy to see that whoever starts from the assumption, 
 that to admit such a hypothesis is impiety, will never find the 
 truth. For there is no historical truth and no philological fact, 
 against which theological obstinacy cannot raise many objections. 
 
DEFENDS THAT STARTLING PROPOSITIOX. 289 
 
 Many of your people think themselves justified in asserting 
 against an alleged historical fact its improbability ; without con- 
 sidering that nothing is true or untrue in the eyes of history, 
 because it is probable or improbable, but simply because, as- 
 suming its general logical possibility, it can be proved to be or 
 not to be a fact. This is a sad subterfuge of Jesuitism or of ig- 
 norance. As long as there shall be critical and honest inquiry 
 of truth-seeking minds, and courage to believe in truth, his- 
 torical facts seem to me as much capable of demonstration as 
 mathematical truths. Of course, in both cases, such a demon- 
 stration supposes a certain knov^ledge and a certain critical faculty. 
 But as we cannot enter now into such a demonstration, let me 
 for a moment beseech you to ask yourselves the question : What 
 reason have you to suppose that, if the book is found to have 
 been written under Antiochus, it was ever meant by the author 
 as an imposition, and not as a poetical form, imperiously pre- 
 scribed by the dreadful circumstances of the time, and rightly 
 understood by the faithful for whom it was written out of the 
 purest motives. You must be aware, that your supposition is 
 quite a gratuitous one. On the contrary, if you look to the 
 state of things, and if you consider the place which the book of 
 Daniel occupies in the Hebi'ew canon, at the very end of which 
 it is placed, separated from all the old prophetic works, you 
 cannot be surprised that I declare myself not at all to be startled 
 by that hypothesis, which appears to me even now all but proved 
 in spite of my feeble knowledge of the Hebrew and of the 
 Chaldee. On the contrary, I feel now much more strongly the 
 truly sacred and prophetic character of the book, when I take 
 all the account of the histories of the Ptolemies and the Seleu- 
 eides before Antiochus Epiphanes to be a historical introduction 
 under the form of a vision, as the character assumed demanded 
 it. I then am struck more than ever by the strength of faith in 
 the pious mind of the author, to behold the light of salvation, 
 when the clouds were blacker than ever, and when nothing but 
 extermination or apostasy seemed to remain to God's chosen 
 people. As I find this belief in the political salvation of his 
 people the more sublime and holy, because it is in his mind 
 identified with his faith in God's eternal kingdom of truth and 
 VOL. II. U 
 
290 THE APOLOaY OF HIPPOLYTUS. 
 
 justice on earth, this fact gives me strength to believe that the 
 prophecy respecting the end of human destinies will at last prove 
 substantially true. So much now of Daniel. 
 
 Considering all this, I confess I feel only the more strongly 
 the imperfection and the presumption of what I wrote in my 
 book about Antichrist. But allow me to repeat to you, my 
 Christian friends, what I said to the English divines, when 
 justifying myself before them. In judging me respecting this 
 point, you ought not to forget the times in which I lived. I 
 did not write for my amusement. "When I composed my book 
 about Antichrist, containing comments on Daniel and the Apo- 
 calypse, in the reign of the emperor Severus, the people had not 
 yet recovered from the panic, caused some years before, by the 
 ridiculous calculations of Judas, the unenlightened Christian 
 writer, who had endeavoured to prove, that, according to St. 
 John, Antichrist must come, and the world must perish, in the 
 tenth 3'ear of that emperor, by which, I suppose, he meant to 
 designate the end of the second century after the birth of Christ. 
 I was opposed to that interpretation, although I felt all the 
 weight of those terrible times, as my words sufficiently prove. 
 You may read them in that book, where, explaining the seventh 
 chapter of Daniel, and speaking of the fourth monarchy (which 
 I took to be that of the Romans, and the last), I say : " Al- 
 ready the iron reigns : already it tames and crushes every- 
 thing : already it subdues all who are unwilling : already we 
 see these things." That same feeling of a great catastrophe 
 about to happen in the known world was so much in the hearts 
 of all our people, that I could not avoid expressing an opinion 
 about it. But see what I said when entering upon this sub- 
 ject : " We are obliged to say that which we ought not to 
 say, because we are forced to do so." And then I hesitatingly 
 bring forward a guess, which is based upon a conjecture adopted 
 and taught by my venerable master, IrenaBus, that the world's 
 having been created in six days seems to imply that it would 
 
IMPERIAL DESPOTISM THE END OF THE WORLD. 291 
 
 last six thousand years, '* one day being with the Lord as a 
 thousand years, and a thousand years as one day." Now, as I 
 had in my " Chronicle " adopted the scheme which seemed to 
 me the most probable, that our Lord was born in the 5500th year 
 of the world, I ventured to say that it would not improbably 
 come to an end after five hundred years more, therefore about 
 three hundred years beyond the time in which I wrote. 
 
 It certainly seemed impossible to us that the Roman empire, 
 and therefore the world, should last much longer. Broken and 
 shaken as it was, that empire became more and more divided 
 between rival commanders of legions. There was no nation or 
 national life left within, and none without, as far as we short- 
 sighted mortals could see. But, moreover, in the eyes of a 
 Christian, there was such a depravity and rottenness in the state, 
 so demoralizing a system of government, such contempt for laws 
 human and divine, so unblushing a purpose to govern by force 
 and terror only, under the simulacrum of republican forms. It 
 was a military government, with a double army ; an army of 
 police to watch and denounce, and one of preetorians to crush 
 every aspiratioii after lawful liberty, and to punish even the 
 appearance of resistance or dissatisfaction. The spies, called 
 delator esy under cover of the law, entered into all the private 
 relations of life and preyed upon the people. The Christians, 
 who were almost incessantly vexed and persecuted and tortured 
 and slaughtered for defending the only liberty of mankind not 
 yet extinguished, that of not worshipping idols, could least of 
 all believe that God would tolerate such a state of things much 
 longer, and not perform an act of divine justice, which to the 
 elect would be one of mercy. Do you think, that because they 
 made no revolution they did not execrate tyranny, and did not 
 pray for the speedy end of it ? We never ceased to be Romans 
 and Greeks, and we never praised arbitrary rule as a divine 
 institution. If we had done so, we should have been unworthy 
 to be the disciples of Christ. Our belief in the approaching end 
 of the world was an error ; so it was with the blessed Apostles 
 themselves, at least during a great part of their lives. But, in 
 looking back, I think there was some truth in that foreboding, the 
 result both of despair and of faith, both of moral indignation 
 
 tJ 2 
 
292 THE APOLOGY OF HIPPOLYTUS. 
 
 and of divine love. A vs^orld was indeed at that time crumbling 
 to pieces, and Christianity was, in the hands of Providence, a 
 powerful element of its dissolution. For let nobody overlook 
 this truth, the elements of life become elements of death to those 
 who reject them. "We were right in our forebodings of the im- 
 minent fall of the world which we saw. We were heard when, 
 in the hours of persecution and of prayer, we exclaimed, " O 
 Lord, how long !" The world which we knew did terminate : 
 what we were ignorant of was, that a new world was already 
 beginning, while we thought all lost on this earth. 
 
 When, therefore, I now hear of such forebodings, I do not at 
 all scorn and deride them. There must be some feeling of 
 decay, some looking for a necessary change, which makes people 
 listen, not only to wild dreams, and to old and new prophecies, 
 but even to such dull books as those which they have made me 
 read. But that they, as Christians, should believe that the 
 world is to come to an end, because, perchance, they are at an 
 end with their theological systems and wisdom, that seems very 
 strange to me. It certainly is much more absurd than that we 
 should have come to a similar conclusion, when we were at the 
 end, not only of our wisdom, but also of our hopes. What am 
 I to think of their Chi'istian faith ? Do they not believe (and even 
 preach) that Christianity must cover the face of the earth, even 
 as the waters cover the great deep ? And do they not see that 
 very gradually, but still unmistakeably, it has begun to penetrate 
 the civil and social relations of life, after having for many 
 centuries merely varnished over the surface of a barbarous 
 society ? And do they not see by the side of the elements of 
 destruction (more eflfects than causes in themselves) many 
 elements of life ? Are there not nations ? is there not national 
 life ? Is there not a general yearning for Christ's religion, for 
 the simple truth of the Gospel ? At all events, if on this point 
 Irenaeus and I were so hasty and such fools as many of you may 
 think, your people seem scarcely to show the great wisdom I 
 expected to find in you. 
 
 Now when I did not conceal this my opinion from my kind 
 interpreter, a colleague of his, a man of plain speech, and very 
 undoubting and authoritative, observed, I had not fallen upon 
 
OPINION RESPECTING THE LATER CREEDS. 293 
 
 the right books : he gave me others, and " Look here," he ex- 
 claimed, *'and then say whether you can see the progress we 
 have made, if you compare with these good and sober books all 
 those queer and useless things you have written about the Crea- 
 tion, in explaining, or rather obscuring, the first chapters of 
 Genesis, which are so clear to us, and in short, if you look back 
 to all your useless speculations which are prying irreverently 
 into the secrets of God's nature. For, my Christian friend," he 
 added, in a most solemn tone, " do not take it ill, but I have 
 very serious doubts whether you are after all correct in your 
 doctrine, and really orthodox." 
 
 You see, we thus came from the exegetical question to the 
 chapter of theological orthodoxy. I soon found that my new 
 friend tested this orthodoxy principally by certain metaphysical 
 formularies. He did not accuse me flatly of heterodoxy, but he 
 condemned me for having raised philosophical questions on re- 
 vealed things, which, he said, were to be believed without being 
 inquired into, whenever they were unintelligible. '* Look," my 
 new friend said, " how shortly we treat all these mysteries, how 
 reverently we abstain from prj'ing curiously into them ! Enough 
 has been said of them in the creeds and in the formularies of the 
 later councils, who have so well settled all these matters for us 
 and for the whole Christian world, that we do not think about 
 them any more. Alas for you, that it was done after your time ? 
 This is an excuse as far as it goes, although I am startled to 
 hear that you were on this score so much more ignorant, and so 
 much less clear and precise, than I supposed you to have been. 
 At all events, I am sure you will now accept these formularies 
 thankfully, subscribe to them unconditionally, and in future 
 hold your peace ; or if you must go on putting questions, express 
 yourself more correctly and guardedly, and be satisfied with our 
 short and reserved answers." 
 
 *' My good friend," I answered him, " does it not strike you 
 that such language must be, if not humbling, at least startling 
 to me, who am called one of the Fathers, and who was thought; 
 
 u 4 
 
294 THE APOLOGY OF HIPPOLYTUS. 
 
 the first author of my time in the Roman, if not in the whole 
 of the Western, Church. I must begin to learn ; and I will 
 carefully read those books of yours, to which you refer, both of 
 interpretation and of doctrine : they must be quite wonderful, 
 to have inspired you with such a confidence in the wisdom of 
 your party." 
 
 When I had read them, my old idea returned. These learned 
 people, I said, have certainly, however they deny it, a private 
 and esoteric, as well as a popular and exoteric, doctrine and 
 system of interpretation. For those formularies are full of 
 what appear to me fragments and remains of the speculations of 
 our time. I perceive very plainly that there can have been no 
 more Gnosticism and Gnostic acuteness to combat when they 
 were framed, but rather questions which the Divines of the 
 Church themselves raised upon conceits of their own, and decided 
 all their own way. Still, however that be, what connection is 
 there between these metaphysical formularies and your own 
 books ? There is no harm in those books : we used to tell 
 something like their contents to our children before they were 
 of full age ; but as to explaining those formularies, or leading 
 to an insight into the great questions which arise in the mind 
 intent upon divine things, and the relation of the immortal soul 
 to God and to the universe, they do not even attempt it. So 
 that here is a great puzzle for me. If indeed there is not this 
 secret learning and interpretation which they conceal from me, 
 I am driven to a startling dilemma. Either they believe in 
 those formularies, and in the passages of the Bible to which 
 they refer ; and then the thinking men do not believe in that 
 (to speak plainly) materialistic and sensual view of those homely 
 books, in which the Creation is treated as a process of manu- 
 facture, and the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, as three historical 
 personages. Or these people really express what they under- 
 stand of Christianity in those dry, empty, and shallow doctrinal 
 works ; and then they do not really believe in the formularies 
 of the ancient Church, but maintain them only out of super- 
 stition, and from a political respect for what is established. 
 But what becomes then of their evangelical faith in the 
 Scriptures ? St. John's prologue, and Christ himself in the 
 
IS PUZZLED BY THESE CKEEDS. 295 
 
 most important speeches reported of him in that Gospel, speak 
 a metaphysical language ; so do St. Paul's Epistles : and, 
 besides, the whole Christian faith stands upon this, that there 
 is a moral and holy government of the world. What is there 
 of either in these books, if you compare them even with what 
 the heathens, whether poets or philosophers, have said of things 
 divine and human ? Now, I said to myself, this is a most 
 serious dilemma, and I must satisfy my mind at least to a 
 certain point on this all-important subject. As for myself, 
 since they are becoming aggressive, I shall never be able to 
 defend myself successfully, unless I occasionally take the 
 offensive. And as for them, they will never derive any ad- 
 vantage from these disputations, unless some thought be stirred 
 up in their minds, which will be done more easily when they 
 perceive how they would appear to us if we were to have judged 
 them at Rome or Alexandria. 
 
 With these ideas in my mind, I agreed to have a conference 
 with my new friends, and having met them accordingly, I said : 
 *' You have conferred a double benefit upon me ; for, having 
 promised me one set of books, as expressing your religious 
 system, you have given me, most distinctly, two. What 
 embarrasses me is this, that these two appear to me to be very 
 loosely, if at all, connected with each other : I mean the ancient 
 creeds, and your own meditations on Christianity. You must 
 therefore extend your kindness still farther, and help your 
 guest, that he may know in what way you unite the two in 
 your minds ; for I am sure you must feel the want of bringing 
 into harmony elements which appear so very heterogeneous. 
 Otherwise, I am afraid, this entire want of connection between 
 two things, both of which you receive as expositions of your 
 faith, must end either in distracting you, or in making you give 
 up the one or the other, if not Christianity altogether. Now, 
 as to your creeds, the one on which I understand the bishops 
 agreed at Nicasa, about a hundred years after I left this world, 
 comes in many points very near my own mind, only that it 
 seems to say either too much or too little on philosophical 
 points. Above all, it appears to me strange that the World 
 should have so merged in the Son, that it has entirely dis- 
 
 V 3 
 
296 THE APOLOGY OF IIIPPOLYTUS. 
 
 appeared. This I must consider rather a departure from 
 Scripture; and I cannot help thinking that it has led to an 
 unphilosophical identification, not in substance/ but in form, of 
 the divinity and humanity of Christ, or the Logos and the 
 historical Christ. The speculative Christian mind will always 
 have a great reluctance to identify one with the other so 
 entirely without distinction, as to merge the eternal idea 
 entirely in its temporal manifestation. We found that in our 
 disputes with the Gnostics. But as to the formulary named 
 after Athanasius, he who made it, and those who adopted it as 
 an expression of the consciousness of the Church, must have 
 entirely lost sight of the principal object and the very starting 
 point and origin of our speculations. It treats one subordinate 
 question alone, and this not only more peremptorily than 
 Scripture authorizes us to do, but also less philosophically. 
 Above all, what state must the human mind have been in, either 
 to demand or to yield implicit adhesion to such formal subtleties 
 under pain of damnation ! I do not wonder now that the false 
 prophet and his followers destroyed Christianity in half the 
 world; and I am comforted about that incredible saying of a 
 learned bishop of New Rome, styling himself a patriarch, who, 
 as my German friend has told me, having read a theological 
 book of mine which the copyists had attributed to Josephus, 
 wondered how the Jew could speak about Christ ' almost as if 
 he were a Christian.' There must be, I think, something very 
 wrong in those formularies, if the primitive consciousness of the 
 Church respecting God, the Word, and the Son, became so 
 entirely obscured to those who had only just completed a system 
 of divinity out of those formularies. 
 
 " All this, my friends," I continued, " I say in self-defence ; 
 it is the impression which those old formularies make upon me 
 when I am summoned to correct what I have said of Christ, 
 and what the whole Church said in my time. I feel there is 
 something in those creeds which connects itself with my own 
 thoughts, but also something which I cannot connect well with 
 what we had been taught, and what we ourselves taught, 
 sixteen or seventeen hundred years ago. Such, then, is my 
 difficulty with the old formularies. But as to your modern 
 
STILL MORE PUZZLED BY ENGLISH DIVINITY. 297 
 
 books, what is there in them of the Infinite or the Absolute, of 
 the first principal Cause of the Universe, with the confession of 
 which all those formularies begin ? Not one syllable. What 
 is there in them of the Self-consciousness of God, the eternal 
 Word, being God Himself, by whom all things were created, in 
 whom all created things have their life, and mankind their 
 light, that is to say, the understanding of things divine? 
 Absolutely nothing. And as to the modern philosophers to 
 whom you refer, those who pretend to preach what pure reason 
 teaches, they seem to me to be downright materialists." 
 
 Here they stopped me, and said: ''Stop, stranger, you 
 Germanize. Where is any thing of this modern philosophical 
 mysticism either in Scripture or in the formularies you speak of? 
 Let us reason and speculate upon purely scriptural and catholic 
 ground, on the words of the Bible, and of the creeds." 
 
 " Well," I said, " you agree, then, to enter into a philo- 
 sophical discussion upon this basis ? " ** We do," they ex- 
 claimed. — "And you will allow me now, in my turn, to ask 
 you questions, starting from some point which we both think 
 self-evident, and therefore a safe beginning ? " " We will," 
 they replied. — "I rejoice in this, and have only to ask one 
 single preliminary question, which may appear very strange to 
 some of you. Are you convinced that you exist, and that you 
 know you exist ? " " What do you mean ? " they exclaimed. 
 — "Do you believe that you yourselves are a reahty ?" " If 
 not," one replied, " what should we believe in at all? " — "I am 
 exceedingly obliged to you," I said, " for granting me so much. 
 Well, then, you will have no difficulty in believing that you are 
 thinking and reasoning beings, not by accident, but necessarily, 
 because it is only by believing reason to be a reality, that you 
 are conscious of existing yourselves." " We do not doubt such 
 a reality," they exclaimed. — "Well, I rejoice at that ex- 
 ceedingly," I replied, " for if you really do so, you will feel 
 yourselves obliged to follow whither our common reasoning will 
 lead us of necessity, unless we disbelieve ourselves. And, 
 besides, I think that, knowing reason cannot be in contradiction 
 with itself, you will do so willingly, and thus relieve me of 
 much pain and trouble. I then start from this your faith in 
 
298 THE APOLOGY OF IIIPPOLYTUS. 
 
 reasoning; for, as to the creeds, I know already that you 
 believe in them. 
 
 "You, therefore, in the first place, confess the Father to be 
 the Creator of all things, visible and invisible ? " " We do." — 
 " What is visible is the material world?" " So it is." — " The 
 invisible things, therefore, do they not mean the immaterial? " 
 " How should they not ? " — " Now what is immaterial may be 
 infinite or may be finite, as you say our soul is, as having been 
 created." " It may." — " But God cannot be finite, and mixst 
 therefore be infinite." "Who doubts that?" — "Is not that 
 which is infinite called so because it has no limits in its being?" 
 " It is." — " Which of the two, then, is the positive, and which 
 the negative? I mean, which of the two asserts something 
 afllrmative, — that which is without bounds, or that which has 
 certain bounds and limits? " " We do not know." — " Well," 
 I replied, " I think you do, my Christian friends. I see your 
 difficulty. If you look to the formation of the word, the Infinite 
 seems to be the negation of the Finite. So is the being im- 
 mortal the negation of being mortal. But would you be affirm- 
 ing something, if you were satisfied with asserting that to be 
 immortal is nothing but the negation of being subject to death? 
 Must there not be some positive substance of reality, which 
 exempts God's existence from being limited as to time ? " " It 
 is so, undoubtedly." — "Well, but then you can scarcely mean 
 to deny that Indivisible and Infinite are expressions implying 
 something in the highest degree positive. Now, if we take 
 away all limitations of Substance and Being, may that which 
 remains not be called the Absolute?" "It may." — "Now, if 
 God is the Absolute, and the spirit of man is the Relative or 
 Limited, of two things one must be true. Either the Absolute 
 and the Relative are different from each other in kind, and then, 
 of course, there can be no inward and substantial, but only an 
 outward and accidental, connection between them. Or they 
 are diff'erent only in degree, by the accident of existence by 
 which the Finite is affected ; oi*, in other terms, only as far as 
 the one is without limitation, and therefore not bound to time 
 or space, and does not exist in them nor according to the laws 
 of either, as you allow that our spirit and reasoning do ? " 
 
QUESTIONS THEM RESPECTING 2ND ARTICLE. 299 
 
 " Certainly, one or the other," they answered ; " but we do not 
 see what could decide us to affirm the one or the other." 
 
 *' Indeed ! " was my reply ; " but you do believe the second 
 article of the Nicene Creed ? " *' We should not think ourselves 
 Christians if we did not." — "Well, then, let us look at the first 
 words of that article. Much as I regret that the language of 
 St. John's prologue is rather obscured or slighted in the expres- 
 sions of the Nicene Creed, and entirely neglected in what is 
 called the Athanasian, this much is certain, the Son is here 
 declared to be equal to the Father, because he is taken to be 
 the embodiment of the eternal Word. At all events, you will 
 allow me to use this term instead. Now, is the Word a mani- 
 festation of God or not?" "Of course it is." — "But the 
 Word is itself originally God? " " So the text clearly says." — 
 "What originally exists in the Absolute must substantially, and 
 therefore eternally, be the same. Must it not?" "We do not 
 see how we can gainsay this." — "Now, if the Word be both the 
 manifestation of God's own substance and the adequate expres- 
 sion of his Reason, and, at the same time, be called the Life of 
 created things and the Light of mankind, both created nature 
 and created mind must have a divine substance and life in them, 
 only with this difference, that the mind alone is conscious of it, 
 and therefore has the knowledge of it. Indeed, this saying of 
 the Evangelist seems to me to be borne out by the fact that 
 Gravity and Light, and other phenomena of matter, are mani- 
 festations of the life which is in matter, and the laws of these 
 phenomena can be found out by the strength of Reason which 
 is in the mind. These are the very laws which your old and 
 new natural philosophers have so marvellously investigated and 
 explained by mathematical calculation, which is the lowest 
 degree of philosophy, but a very important one. This proves 
 that Nature and Mind partake of the same divine substance. 
 Reason being consciousness of existence, and the Word being 
 God's own consciousness of Himself, manifesting itself in the 
 mind as Light, which is Reason. At all events, the expression 
 of St. John clearly indicates that the same Word is, in created 
 things, both Existence and Consciousness, and we may there- 
 fore, as Christians, safely adopt the saying, that Mind is conscious 
 
300 THE APOLOGY OF niPPOLYTUS. 
 
 nature, and Nature unconscious mind. Indeed, I do not see 
 how we can interpret the prologue otherwise. Now, if the 
 mind partakes of the divine substance, how can you deny that 
 the understanding of things divine is in us, and that this is the 
 real knowledge of ourselves ? It appears to me, that we cannot 
 help agreeing ; only we must take care not to lose sight of the 
 difference between the Finite and the Infinite." 
 
 To this they replied, they did not see how to deny this con- 
 sequence ; but the terms I used did not convey to them a clear 
 philosophical idea ; and they therefore asked me whether I would 
 not use another term for marking this difference between God 
 and man. " Let us see," I replied ; " perhaps Plato will help 
 us in this, together with St. John's genuine, that is to say, well 
 divided text. Should you understand me better, if we turn the 
 phrase thus ? Every thing that exists really and absolutely, not 
 being subject to any limits, cannot be subject either to time or to 
 space, or to any division or change of existence." " Doubtless." — 
 *'Is not time divided into past, present, and future?" " Every 
 body knows that." — " Now it is generally allowed that there is 
 a change implied in this, so that what is past is not, but has 
 been ; what is future is not, but will be ; and what is present is 
 such that it neither has been exactly as it is now, nor will be so 
 in future ; otherwise there would be no division. But at all 
 events there is a division in time ; and the Infinite cannot be 
 affected by a division : therefore God is rightly called He who 
 is above time or timeless. And you will certainly also allow 
 that there is change in the things which have a finite existence, 
 and that change cannot exist in absolute Being ? " '' How should 
 it?" — "Now, if there cannot be change, there cannot be de- 
 velopment either, which is the change of one and the same thing 
 from one state of existence into another ; of which, change in 
 time and in space is the form. Is it so?" "We afiirm it." — 
 " And at the same time you see that here lies the difficulty. 
 For the Infinite cannot be subject to change, and still we 
 acknowledge it to be the cause of that changeable existence 
 which we know to be a reality. Here then seems to be a con- 
 tradiction, and it seems the most natural method to start from 
 the difference between what exists unchangeably, and what is 
 
IS NOT AFRAID OF CONSEQUENCES. 301 
 
 in a continual transition from one state to another. Shall we 
 then call this transition of existence from one state into another, 
 that which is evolving, the Evolving? endeavouring thus to ex- 
 press the Genesis of the Greek, the Fieri of the Latins, or the 
 Werden of the Germans, in opposition to the Esse or the Sein. 
 Very well ; shall we then say that the Infinite is the Being, and 
 the Finite the Evolving?" "We cannot think of a better term, 
 so let us adopt that English word." — " Well," I continued, "if 
 we allow this, our former argument seems to oblige us also to 
 say, that as the Infinite is difierent from the Finite only in that 
 the one has limitations, the other not, the Evolving (or the 
 limited existence of mind in time) does not differ from God's 
 Being but in this, that the one is an ideal, the other a real 
 existence. We must now see what we understand by an ideal 
 and a real existence. I presume, then, that we take real in the 
 sense that it means what exists in time and space, and ideal in 
 the sense that it signifies the creative thought of the same, that 
 which in all these changes constitutes the unity of the evolving 
 existence. This thought is an existence, yea, the only true 
 existence in the highest sense, because it not only does not 
 change, but we have declared it to be the cause of all changeable 
 existence. We may therefore say that the Thought, identified 
 with Will, and animated by Love, is that which must be called 
 the Being, that which is, in the eminent sense, and that this 
 Being is eternal, and not subject to time, therefore not subject 
 to the change from past into present, and from present into 
 future." 
 
 " I see," said one of them, an elderly man, " what you are 
 driving at : but what becomes of the difierence between Jesus 
 and the believer, between Christ and the Christian?" — "Why, 
 if I answer that the difference is that between the Infinite, not 
 deteriorated in substance by the connection with the Finite, but 
 substantially expressed by it within the limits of the evolving 
 existence and therefore also of time and space, on the one hand, 
 and of the Infinite inadequately expressed (as all believers find 
 in themselves it is) on the other, I think I follow closely tlie 
 argument which has led us safely to our former conclusions. 
 And, in doing so, I find also we arrive exactly at a view of the 
 
302 THE APOLOGY OF HIPPOLYTUS. 
 
 matter, without which you, I will not say cannot accept, but 
 cannot even understand, one word of our creeds, any more than 
 of our prologue." 
 
 " Well," exclaimed my elderly friend, " do you not see that 
 there is great danger in such a juxta-position ?" 
 
 " Instead of answering you directly," I replied, " let me ask 
 in my turn : Do you think there can be any real danger in truth, 
 as truth ?" " No, certainly not," he answered ; " I cannot allow 
 that." 
 
 " Well, indeed, I do not think you can, without denying our 
 second and our first articles, Christ and God himself. For you 
 know that you are flying in the face of the most positive and 
 solemn expressions and assurances of Christ himself. I do not 
 see how, if you are not really children of God, you can believe 
 him to be the child of God. 
 
 " If the danger then is in the abuse of something good, as of 
 truth and godliness, and if the measure of that danger is in 
 the measure of the importance of the object abused, will there 
 not be found the greatest danger in the greatest good, and, there- 
 fore, in the greatest truth?" "So it would appear." — "But 
 that danger is not in truth itself, but in the misunderstanding 
 of it?" " It must be in the misunderstanding." — " Might we 
 not therefore say, there is no greater danger than in the mis- 
 understanding of the truths taught by Scripture and Reason 
 respecting the highest, that is to say, the divine things?" "We 
 might." — " But is not the final consequence we have to draw 
 herefrom this, that we ought to take the greatest care to 
 understand well the truth?" "Assuredly." — "And who, think 
 you, will understand it best, he who does not think about it, or 
 he who makes it the object of his earnest thought? It appears 
 to me impossible it should not be the latter ; as ignorance of a 
 thing which is allowed to be good, is worse than all misunder- 
 standings of the same. 
 
 They kept silence. But I felt moved in the spirit, and said: 
 *' Having then come so far, let us go straight to the third article ; 
 for I am afraid it is your ignoring that article which makes you 
 still doubtful about the rest. Do you really believe in what the 
 formularies say in it ? " 
 
FEARS THEY DO NOT BELIEVE IN THE SPIRIT.. 303 
 
 " We think we do," they answered, " because we are sure it 
 is scriptural." — "Well, then, you believe in what St. Paul says 
 of the Spirit, that it * searcheth all things, yea, the deep things 
 of God '?" " How should we not? But is that not the Spirit 
 which we confess to be God ?" — " Undoubtedly the Holy Spirit 
 must be in the Being, if it is in the Evolution ; but then we 
 may also turn it and say : How should it not be, finitely and 
 relatively, in the Evolution, if it is, infinitely and absolutely, in 
 the Being?" "But may we indeed turn it so without irreve- 
 rence?" asked my elderly friend. — "Look to it yourself," I 
 replied. " Can you otherwise explain those words of the 
 Apostle? Can the Spirit, as far as he is the Infinite Being 
 Himself, search the deep things, that is, the hidden nature or 
 substance of God ? " "It would appear not." — "Well, then, 
 the Apostle must have understood it as referring to that divine 
 Spirit which is in the mind of believers." " But then I ask," 
 he replied, " where is the standard of truth, considering the 
 great divergence of opinions and assertions respecting truth?" 
 
 And here I could not help smiling, and I said : " Well, do 
 you not see now that I was not quite wrong when I expressed 
 my doubts respecting your belief in the third article ? For that 
 which follows, that you believe in the Universal Church, seems 
 to me to give the answer required." " How does it? " asked my 
 friend, with somewhat of astonishment. 
 
 " I have spoken of the Holy Spirit as being in the believers, 
 not in the believer. Now let us inquire of that argument which 
 has brought us so far ; perhaps it will yield us the answer we 
 seek. The Spirit and the Church are put together, here and in 
 all evangelical and Apostolic writings. The Spirit is in the 
 Church, and the Church is all the believers. If you have a 
 doubt vipon this point, I am ready to discuss it with you 
 thoroughly, even if you will force me to descend to discussions 
 like that of Apostolic succession. For we are here arrived at 
 the very cause of much confusion and of much trouble, present 
 and to come." " No," exclaimed a younger friend, " that would 
 be what you would have called in your language an * apros- 
 dionyson,' or something uncongenial with thoughts of things 
 divine and intellectual. I certainly should like you to tell us 
 
304 THE APOLOGY OF IITPPOLYTUS. 
 
 afterwards something about the sacraments and baptismal re- 
 generation. But at present let us keep to the main argument, 
 and I may assert that we who are here present agree to the 
 proposition." — "Generalizing, then, this proposition," I con- 
 tinued, " will not the relation of the Spirit to the Church, as to 
 the believing universality of mankind, be analogous to the re- 
 lation which the Word, and its embodiment in Jesus, bears to 
 the believing individual? — so that there would be, respecting 
 man, two co-eternal manifestations of the Infinite, the individual 
 and the collective. Certainly, as we have taken ourselves to be 
 a reality, God cannot have thought man except in a double ca- 
 pacity, as an individual and as a whole. For the realization of 
 the Infinite by the finite human mind, moving in time, is neces- 
 sarily a double one ; that by the individual mind, and that by 
 the whole human race. It is self-evident that one cannot 
 think of mankind without thinking of man : but see whether we 
 can think of man without thinking of him also as an integral part 
 of many ? God did not create man, but men, man and woman. 
 
 " In order to understand the proposition now under discus- 
 sion, you may begin with what is the most self-evident necessity 
 of the human existence, the domestic relations, and proceeding 
 thence, you necessarily will arrive at the great society of man- 
 kind, divided into families, tribes, and nations, and exhibiting 
 itself in the succession of generations, through ages and ages. 
 The Evolution here, is it not the same as in the individual, only 
 on a larger scale ? Is it not a continued change, and un- 
 doubtedly the most complete development of the idea of 
 humanity ? " 
 
 « It is." 
 
 " Such an evolution may last hundreds and thousands of 
 years ; it always will remain finite, as that which is evolving 
 within the limits of time and space, and never will become that 
 which really and truly is, the Being, because the Being allows 
 of nothing divided, and, therefore, not of time and change. 
 Eternity is not accumulation, but extinction, of time. There- 
 fore, nobody can say that omx argument makes mankind God, 
 any more than that it makes man God. Still less can any one 
 say that it gives God no ante-mundane or extra-mundane exist- 
 
ON THE PERSONALITY OF TUE SPIRIT. 305 
 
 ence. On the contrary, our argument shows the logical 
 absurdity of letting the Being grow out of the Evolution ; which 
 last is a division of existence, and, therefore, presupposes the 
 totality of existence, or the absolute Being (uniting absolute 
 Will with absolute Reason and the complete consciousness of 
 their Unity), fully as much as the effect presupposes the cause, 
 or the material object expressive of thought and reason presup- 
 poses that immaterial thought and reason." 
 
 " But," asked my inquisitive young friend, " if we agree to 
 this, must we then not consider the Spirit a Person, as much as 
 the Son ? And you seem to have had a great reluctance in 
 allowing this." 
 
 " This is a difficult question," I replied ; " but I thank you 
 for adverting to this point. I think I can satisfy you by two 
 positions. First, I called the Word as much a Person as the 
 Father. The Son is conscious Reason united with Will, as the 
 Father is conscious Will united with Reason. For a Person 
 not aifected by Finiteness can mean nothing but a conscious 
 Being, uniting both Will and Reason. The Subject in the in- 
 finite Being implies no more limitation than its adequate 
 Object : both are infinite. In the second place, I agree with 
 you, of course, that whatever is in the Evolution must be in the 
 Being, except the Finiteness, and what belongs to Finiteness : 
 for that is the Creation, flowing out of divine Love. I therefore 
 think, the line of argument which we have hitherto followed 
 would oblige us to say something like the following. The 
 element of the Spirit, as the general feeling by which different 
 individuals are united in thought and in action, manifests itself 
 practically more or less in every society, as distinct from the 
 sum of positive and negative elements of individuals which com- 
 pose it, when referred to the common object which unites them. 
 And still, whichever of those component members is moved by 
 the general Spirit to identify himself with the object of the 
 association, and with whatever of reasonable and good is mani- 
 fested by its other members, finds this general Spirit of the asso- 
 ciation overpowering, but not destroying, his own individuality, 
 on the contrary purifying and strengthening it. Now this could 
 not be the case so generally, unless there were in the nature of 
 
 VOL. IL X 
 
306 THE APOLOGY OF HIPPOLYTUS. 
 
 the mind, and therefore also of the infinite Mind, an element of 
 the eternal substance which manifests itself exclusively in the 
 collective humanity, and not in the individual as individual. He 
 who should gainsay this, would be obliged to maintain that the 
 difference implied is identical with the difference between Finite 
 and Infinite, which is absurd, for both belong to the Finite. 
 The unity of language, of society, of church, of mankind, is 
 therefore a reality, as well as the individual person is one, and 
 inherent in the idea of man. This too must be the reason why 
 people united in one way or another can feel, and speak, and 
 act together as they do ; and this will be the real explanation 
 of the fact which we are daily witnessing, that people are seized 
 by the Spirit, as by an invisible current of a higher, all-pervad- 
 ing element. I think you will also agree with me, if I add that 
 this is the only explanation worthy of thinking men, of the very 
 origin both of speech and of religion among mankind. What 
 therefore is called, with more or less truth, the common or 
 public spirit, has its origin in God's eternal substance, and not 
 in that which unthinking theologians have called the divine 
 economy of the world, as having its root only in the Finite or 
 in the Evolution. But, on the other hand, you will allow that 
 there is a difference. The existence of this unity is and remains 
 an ideal one in the Evolution, for it never appears embodied in 
 the individual. It was not even so in the Apostles. The 
 Spirit was in them, but never in one alone ; and it was fully 
 poured out upon a congregation of one hundred and twenty in- 
 dividuals, who were seized by it, the Apostles being an element 
 only, although the most prominent part, of that society. We 
 might perhaps say that the Spirit is both the ideality of the real 
 existence of the human mind, and the highest finite reality of 
 God's own thought of mankind, that is to say, of the totality 
 of the human development. Or, so it be clearer to you, we 
 may express the same idea thus. As the Word, having become 
 the Son in the Evolution, is the adequate expression of God's 
 consciousness of Himself as of the One Being, and of man as 
 individual ; so the Spirit, become finite, is God's complete 
 consciousness of Himself, both as Will and as Reason, both as 
 Infinite (in Himself) and as Finite (in the Evolution), and 
 
ENGLISH VIEWS OF INSPIRATION. 307 
 
 finally as cause both of individual and of collective mind. I 
 have no objection, if you will call this link between the One and 
 the Many, in the Infinite as well as in the Finite, Love ; for 
 how could manifoldness be One, but by Love ?" 
 
 *' I think this is clearer to me," replied my young friend, who 
 seemed to me much relieved by what had been said. 
 
 " Well," I continued, "it appears you are inclined to absolve 
 me now from any heresy against the Spirit. But I am afraid I 
 must now in my turn express a great anxiety for yourselves." 
 
 And here a great excitement became visible among my 
 learned friends. For no sooner had I pronounced a few words 
 than almost all of them began to cry out against my temerity. 
 And indeed, even now, some kind friends near me make me 
 signs to pass over that part of our conversation, giving me 
 clearly enough to understand that they are afraid you will not 
 hear me patiently, or at all events will not become or remain 
 impressed in my favour, if I relate to you all I said. But as 
 the Spirit moved me to speak then, so does it now; and 
 knowing that I have your interest at heart, not my own, except 
 as far as truth is concerned, I will withhold nothing from you, 
 firmly relying upon your fairness and the Christian spirit 
 within vou. 
 
 What I said was something like the following : — 
 " My dear and learned Christian friends, I cannot quite get 
 over my apprehension that you are heretical in your ideas 
 respecting Inspiration. We thought, in our time, the holy 
 men were inspired ; you seem to think the sacred books are 
 inspired. This is a heresy, and one which I had often to combat 
 when arguing with the Jews. Still in them I could understand 
 it : for they having no word for Person, and consequently none 
 for personal existence, could never, in their metaphysical 
 speculations, rise above the abstract notion. But what pains 
 me infinitely more is, to find such antichristian tendencies 
 among you." 
 
 X 2 
 
308 
 
 THE APOLOGY OF HIPPOLTTDS. 
 
 " Surely, you do not mean to say seriously," exclaimed my 
 friend, smiling, " that there is so enormous a difference between 
 the two formulas ? Will an inspired man not write an inspired 
 book?" 
 
 " No, my friend," I felt obliged to reply, " unless you have 
 the lowest of all ideas of what we used to call Inspiration at 
 Lugdunum and at Rome, as well as in Alexandria. Inspiration 
 works on the Spirit, therefore on Reason ; for Spirit is Truth, 
 and Truth is Reason. Certainly, a mind so inspired, that is to 
 say, divested of Self, and driven to speak out what is Reality in 
 him, of which Self is the negation, will speak and write as an 
 inspired reasonable being, not as an unconscious organ, like a 
 clairvoyant. Otherwise be would not be elevated to the divine 
 region of thought, but lowered to the region of unconscious 
 matter or nature. Not that I believe that the prophetical 
 writings, from the most ancient parts of the Old Testament to 
 the Apocalypse, can be reasonably explained without admitting 
 the reality of vision and divination, as entirely distinct from 
 reflective consideration and argumentation. I designate by 
 those words an intuitive insight into the world of the spirit: 
 and I believe that we see a shadow of that intuition upon the 
 domain of unconscious nature in the state of such possessed 
 persons as the Montanist women were. As this is intuition of 
 things and events external, so the other is an immediate insight 
 into things and events internal, connected with the development 
 of the Divine Spirit in humanity. It therefore necessarily 
 centres in that great incorporation of mankind, by which all 
 faithful and pious men are members of a community of Truth, 
 Justice, and Virtue, of which God is the eternal cause and 
 realizer. The existence of such a power of spiritual vision is 
 as much a fact as that of the other, if we interpret faithfully and 
 rationally the prophetical books. But then the prophetic vision 
 requires as much a medium of communication with the outer 
 world as does Demonism, or whatever you will call the state of 
 natural vision. Words are wanted, and words are expressions 
 of the reflecting mind. Now, this mixed state between vision 
 and reflection, which we might call the hypophetic (in contra- 
 distinction to the prophetic), is subject to the natural finiteness 
 
BOTH VISION AND EEFLECTION PROPHETIC. 309 
 
 and limitation of the individual, as of a rational and self- 
 responsible being. Man in that state will speak in intelligible 
 words, not in those convulsive sounds breaking forth from the 
 lips of a man who is overpowered by the sudden pressure of the 
 Infinite ; a phenomenon this latter as old as mankind, but by 
 which I find people among you (and some very shrewd people) 
 are strangely deluded in these days. Man in that state, I say, 
 will speak in his own language, and, as to all things not directly 
 expressing the vision, within the sphere of knowledge and 
 information in which he as an individual, and his nation and 
 age, are moving. That state must therefore necessarily be 
 affected with all the limitations and imperfections of finiteness, 
 and this in the same measure as the communication enters 
 more or less into the real world. The divine nature of the 
 vision does not consist in a magical disappearance of these 
 divinely constituted unchangeable limits of humanity, but 
 simply in this : that the essence of divine truth is not injured 
 by those imperfections ; that what is said by such inspired 
 persons respecting their visions is true in the Spirit, in which 
 alone there is truth. All interpretations of the prophets of the 
 Old Testament and of the Apocalypse, which do not take this 
 factor, that of vision, into account, must be imperfect and even 
 philologically untenable, however elevated and sublime they 
 may be. For these prophecies are not reducible to reflected 
 wisdom, and even the most sublime ethical view, applied to 
 them, will be found insufficient. 
 
 " But on the other hand the finite element, the element of 
 pious and enlightened consideration of the things and events of 
 this world by the reflective faculty of the mind in its normal 
 state of finite consciousness of cause and effect, must be also 
 fully acknowledged and done justice to in those prophetical 
 writings. This part is not less inspired than the other, but 
 differently inspired, and that it constitutes the immensely 
 prevailing element of those writings is not derogatory to their 
 prophetic character, but their most sublime and divine privilege. 
 Here the. substratum is the historical world in its whole reality. 
 Persons, nations, and events of the real world, generally of the 
 very age and time of the writer, are brought forward and 
 
 X 3 
 
310 THE APOLOGY OF HIPPOLTTUS. 
 
 judged, but as members and instruments, or as adversaries and 
 impediments, of the great kingdom of God upon earth, and 
 therefore in what I have called their intellectual or ideal 
 capacity. As to all such parts, the more the prophetical 
 writings can be exjolained historically, as originally and directly 
 applying to historical persons and fticts of the writer's past or 
 present, the greater will be the progress in understanding, not 
 only the prophetic writings, but also the very nature of 
 inspiration : for the real world, the ordinary history of the 
 Jewish people, will be the more elevated to the expression of 
 those eternal ideas, to realize which is the highest destiny and 
 everlasting value of all history. 
 
 " You will now not misunderstand me, if I say that the 
 inspired man will speak or write according to his human 
 capacities, and not according to those of another individual ; in 
 his own language, and not in a tongue he has never learned ; 
 on a subject he lives in, not on things unintelligible and foreign 
 to him. You will not take it ill, if I say that the contrary 
 view is a degrading one, and that, in truth, unbelief lurks at the 
 bottom of it. For, as soon as you allow any such degradation 
 of the working of the Spirit, you deny that Spirit is Reason, 
 and consequently that Inspiration is Truth. Now, as to real 
 inspiration, it cannot be considered separately from its subject. 
 As, therefore, the measure of the inspiration must not only be 
 in proportion to the truth in the man, but also commensurate 
 with the greatness of the object, we call inspired writers 
 properly those who have delivered to us the mysteries of God. 
 There are necessarily also among them differences of degree, 
 and the highest degree will have to be reserved to what is 
 delivered to us of Christ's words and life, and, above all, of what 
 he said of himself, and of his relation to the Father and to 
 mankind. The first place of all, consequently, will belong to 
 what we read on this central subject of Christian faith in 
 St. John's Gospel. Most of the rest in the Apostolical writings 
 is occasional, in part even relating to transitory and external 
 circumstances. Still in all there is one and the same Spirit, 
 and that forms the unity of the canonical works. And this 
 Spirit is eminently that of Truth. But there could not have 
 
INSPIRED PERSONS NOT MACHINES. 311 
 
 been truth in them, if they had been machines, automata ; if, 
 on subjects foreign to their inner life (as astronomy, or any 
 part of science, or historical learning), they had talked or 
 written anything but what they knew and believed, as good 
 honest Jews or Christians, and as children of their parents and 
 their country. And this is the real mischief which lies at the 
 bottom of that view : it is as demoralizing to the mind as 
 degrading to the intellect. I advise you, on the contrary, to 
 look to your own experience and observation, in order to 
 perceive the analogy which other phenomena of human nature 
 show with prophetic vision and writing, and to iniderstand the 
 relation of the ecstatic state to the ordinary state of the mind. 
 First of all look to the difference between the man who has 
 formerly acted upon the selfish principle, and now acts upon 
 the principle of moral responsibility, of duty anl love to God 
 and his brethren ; in short, to the difference between what 
 Scripture calls the natural, and the new or regenerate, man. 
 Here the individual knows that he is the same man, but he 
 feels a new principle of life in him, which can be so little 
 explained by what he thought and did before, that it forms, on 
 the contrary, the most striking contrast with it. But even in 
 ordinary social life, have you not often seen a man say and do 
 things far beyond his ordinary way of thinking and acting, and, 
 as it wei'e, out of his whole habitual existence ? Why, the 
 man has truth and reality in him : the inmost of his being, the 
 mystery of his existence, is touched, a struggle for life and 
 death ensues in him ; and that which is in him of the divine 
 nature, the infinite factor of his mental and intellectual life, 
 overpowers all the dictates, warnings, misgivings of habit and 
 ordinary prudence, and he will speak out and act as, we may 
 well call it, an inspired man. Such analogies will not degrade 
 your view of scriptural inspiration, but, on the contrary, elevate 
 it from empty phrases, liable to be given up one day as vain 
 superstition, into a feeling of reality and truth, which you did 
 not know before. 
 
 *' Nor will it be necessary now for me to add to my defence a 
 word about the hackneyed phrase, thatsuch a view spiritualizes 
 away the idea of revelation and inspiration ; that is safer to keep 
 
 X 4 
 
312 THE APOLOGY OF HIPPOLYTUS. 
 
 to the letter. Now, abstracting from the great Apostolic word, 
 that the letter killeth, would to God those men, and they who 
 preceded them, had only respected the letter of the prophetic 
 writings ! If they had, first of all they would have made greater 
 efforts to understand it ; and, secondly, they would have been 
 ashamed to torture and distort the poor letter into their formu- 
 laries, which are not only lying themselves, but which make the 
 Bible lie. I say, on the contrary, my Christian friends, respect 
 and study the letter, exactly as every letter in an author you 
 respect, and more than any other. For, indeed, ' the place 
 whereon thou standest is holy ground.' That letter forms part 
 of the spiritual centre of the history of mankind, of God's own 
 history, showing the development and future destinies of his 
 kingdom of truth, justice, and love upon this earth. 
 
 " I rejoice to see," I concluded, "that you signify your assent 
 to that : but are you aware of the necessary consequences and 
 corollaries ?" 
 
 '* I do not understand what you mean," replied my friend. 
 
 *' I mean this," I said in explanation : " If Spirit be Reason, 
 rational interpretation is the spiritual, and irrational is the ma- 
 terialistic ; the one ministers to the Spirit, the other to the 
 spirit-killing idolatry of the letter. If you have any thing to say 
 against this, I am ready to reply to it." 
 
 Here our conversation on the three articles of faith seemed 
 for the present exhausted. I asked indeed my young friend, 
 whether he still wanted to know my opinion respecting the 
 recent controversy on baptismal regeneration. But he replied : 
 
 " I see, you there would raise the previous question against 
 them as they did against you ; and I myself think, after what 
 we have discussed, you would have a perfect right to do so. 
 You might also say, you do not belang to our branch of the 
 catholic Church : and," he added smilingly, '' according to the 
 philosophy of some of us, truth is of a local nature, subordinate 
 to authority; therefore, what is truth here, may not be truth else- 
 
KNOWS NOTHING OF BAPTISM OF INFANTS. 313 
 
 where — at least, if Law makes truth. So we shall he satisfied 
 with whatever you may feel disposed to say on the subject." 
 
 I camiot express how thankful I was for this liberal concession 
 of my Christian friend's, and how much I felt relieved ; for, of 
 all things, that controversy has given me more trouble to under- 
 stand than any other. So I said : *' You are very kind indeed, 
 and I shall simply state how the whole controversy would have 
 appeared to us, in our days. We never defended the baptism of 
 children, which in my time had only begun to be practised in 
 some regions, unless it were as an exception and an innovation. 
 Baptism of infants we did not know. Much less did we ever 
 imagine that such an act could have any of those words of our 
 Saviour applied to it which I see some attach to the external act 
 of a simulacrum of the symbolical immersion, accompanied by the 
 promissory act of third persons, which together they call Baptism. 
 We, the old Fathers, should have considered such an opinion 
 heretical, and any pretension to make it an article of faith an un- 
 warrantable tyranny. But understand me well: I do not blame 
 that arrangement of infant baptism in itself, unless it be in this re- 
 spect, that it seems to me to have given rise to superstitious notions 
 of magic influence, such as I have combated in refuting certain 
 heretical sects which believed in sorcery and practised witchcraft. 
 But if that so-called immersion is to be justified, it ought to be 
 followed by what I, a bishop and a teacher of the Church, have 
 considered, and do consider now, the principal part of that rite 
 according to Christ's institution and to the Apostolic practice : 
 I mean the solemn Christian pledge, not of other persons, but 
 of the responsible Catechumen : a pledge, preceded, first by 
 instruction, then by solemn examination in the faith, and finally 
 by the public confession of the same before the whole Church, 
 that is to say, his own congregation. I am not indisposed even 
 to go further, and to praise such a change : there is nothing of 
 such an act in the Bible, but I see in it an act of that Christian 
 liberty which the Spirit sanctifies and even encourages. Why 
 should not the original order of those acts, the totality of which 
 constitutes that baptism which the Apostles and their disciples 
 taught us, be inverted wherever there are Christian families and 
 Christian schools for the young? But, beyond that, every thing 
 
314 THE APOLOGY OF HIPPOLYTUS. 
 
 appears to me perfectly unintelligible, and I am sure would have 
 been so to all Fathers in the East and West in our time, and 
 still more to those before us. Knowing thus my view on this 
 subject, I hope you will not urge me to enter into such an un- 
 toward discussion, which certainly would oblige me to move 
 previous questions on both sides. For I should of all things 
 dislike to be uncivil ; and still, how can I say that sprinkling 
 with water, followed perhaps by imposition of hands, without 
 Christian examination and solemn pledge before the Christian 
 congregation, is Baptism?" 
 
 Here my young friend, who had followed my words with 
 beaming eyes and an intelligent smile, took my hand and said : 
 " No, my good bishop and Father, I do not want you at all to 
 enter into our controversies or squabbles, or whatever you may 
 call them. But, to be sure, you cannot, after what you have 
 said, expect us to go away without having been released from 
 the last difficulty which we feel respecting the Apostolicity of 
 your doctrine ; pray, what did you mean by those words in the 
 book on Antichrist respecting the Eucharist and the Sacrifice?" 
 
 " Well," I replied, " I see I shall not escape here. You 
 touch upon every delicate and sacred point. But I do not know 
 how to resist any challenge coming from you. Only tell me 
 exactly what is the passage to which you refer." 
 
 " Here it is. In explaining the second verse of the ninth 
 chapter of the Proverbs, and in particular the words, * And she 
 (Wisdom) prepared her own table,' you add, as mystical explan- 
 ation : ' That is to say, the knowledge of the Holy Trinity which 
 was promised, and His precious and pure Body and Blood which 
 are daily celebrated on the mystical and divine table, and offered 
 as sacrifice in memory of that ever memorable and first table of 
 the mystic Divine meal.'"^^ 
 
 " Well, and what is there in this passage to shock your feel- 
 ings or your orthodoxy ? " 
 
 " You a sacrificer, my revered Father ["exclaimed my young 
 friend ; " you an abettor of transubstantiation !" 
 
 *' Be a little more patient, my young friend," I replied ; " and 
 above all do not employ, in speaking to me, terms which I never 
 heard, and which I have so much difficulty in understanding. 
 
HUMAN SACRIFICES THE ONLY REAL. 315 
 
 But as to sacrificing, do you not sacrifice whenever you meet ? 
 I am sure you do ; for, in the Book of your Church, I was 
 struck by one very beautiful prayer in the celebration of the 
 Holy Eucharist, where a pious father of yours says : * Accept 
 this our sacrifice of praise and thanksgiving.' And then he goes 
 on to say : * And here we oflTer and present unto Thee, O Lord, 
 ourselves, our souls and bodies, to be a reasonable, holy, and 
 lively sacrifice unto Thee.' I am afraid you have never medi- 
 tated much upon what sacrifice means, and that is a great pity. 
 For how can you comprehend what we, the old Christians, 
 understood by sacrifice, and how can you really know what 
 prayer and worship in spirit and truth is, unless you search 
 diligently yourselves ? and how can you search profitably with- 
 out philosophy ? Is not sacrifice an act of him who sacrifices?" 
 
 " Of course." 
 
 " Well, all the better, if you are clear so far. But to sacri- 
 fice, is it not to offer the life of a living being to God ? " 
 
 " So it appears." 
 
 " To a Christian, can such an act be any thing but a sym- 
 bolical act ?" 
 
 " It certainly cannot mean suicide or human sacrifice." 
 
 " But you do not think the symbol grew out of nothing? A 
 symbol is the expression of a reality." 
 
 ** Undoubtedly it is." 
 
 *' Well, then, can the reality, in the present case, be any thing 
 else but the act of the mind, by which a man gives up Self-will? 
 Is Self-will, as such, any thing but the power of disobeying 
 God's will towards us and within us? and does not the conscious 
 exercise of this Self-will constitute in our conscience an antago- 
 nism to, and a separation from, God, the native centre of our 
 existence ? Finally, must not the giving up of that Self-will 
 be the spontaneous act of a self-responsible believing man ; and, 
 if it be expressed in the common worship, will it not be emi- 
 nently his act, as that of a member of Christ's Church ?" 
 
 " I do not see how it can mean any thing else, for it must have 
 an objective reality." 
 
 " Look, now," I continued, "what a rich mine we seem to have 
 opened. If it be certain, that in the real act of sacrifice subject 
 
316 THE APOLOGY OF HIPPOLYTUS. 
 
 and object are the same, the formula of real sacrifice will he 
 this: It is man sacrificing man, that is to say, himself; the 
 priest and the victim being the same, to speak symbolically. 
 Such indeed is the case, and the crime of human self-sacrifice, 
 the greatest aberration of the misguided human mind, viewed in 
 this light, turns out to be the most natural act of all false, that 
 is to say, of perverted, religion. The abomination of parents 
 sacrificing their children to Moloch, is only explicable by the 
 depth of the idea thus perverted. Human sacrifices are nothing 
 but the unmitigated natural reflection of the instinct of worship, 
 in a mind driven to madness by despair or by vice, or by dis- 
 ordered fanaticism about divine things. For, discarding images 
 and symbolical language, as philosophers ought to do, must we 
 not say that sacrifice is adoration, and that the Christian sacri- 
 fice is the Christian worship ? I understand by adoration that 
 distinctive act, which is the direct expression of the feeling or 
 consciousness of the eternal relation of the soul to the all-per- 
 vading immortal Cause of the Universe. This act is man's 
 direct language to God, his speech to the living author of his 
 existence ; an act, not of habit or of tradition, or ever invented 
 by wise men for the rest of mankind, but the very primitive 
 native impulse and manifestation of the mind, directing itself 
 by inward irresistible power, to the magnetic centre of all 
 Spirits ; the pulsation of the eternal life of man during his 
 pilgrimage through the valley of time, the divine witness of his 
 connection with, and dependence upon, his Maker. There is 
 besides in worship the demand for something: there is thanking 
 for something, there is also the building up of the many into one 
 in the spirit by doctrine and exhortation. All these ingredients 
 are congenial to adoration, and necessary for rational and com- 
 plete common worship, but they are not essential to worship. In 
 one word, as there is no religion without worship, so also is there 
 none without sacrifice, and therefore without priesthood and 
 priests. Is it not so ? " 
 
 " So it would appear." 
 
 " Now, having cleared up this point, the course of the argu- 
 ment will faithfully lead us to a full understanding of the 
 matter, as far as our present conversation is intended to go. 
 
NO SACRIFICE IN COMMUNION AS SUCH. 317 
 
 "What, then, is unphilosphically called sacrifice of thanksgiving 
 would better be termed among divines, the thankful offering 
 which the believer makes of his Self-v^^ill to Qod, resigning it to 
 His holy will, and aspiring to be thus reunited to God." 
 
 "What else should it be," exclaimed my young friend, "if 
 we discard symbolical language, and try to understand the real 
 meaning of Scripture, of language, and of ourselves ! " 
 
 " The Christian sacrifice, therefore," I continued, " could 
 never have been any thing but this ; and indeed never was, as in 
 particular my blessed teacher Irenaeus endeavoured always to 
 impress upon us." 
 
 " But," asked my friend, " would the true Christian sacrifice 
 be an act independent of the Communion ? " 
 
 " This question," I replied, " must be answered according to 
 the sense you attach to it. Evidently, it is so in itself. For 
 the sacrifice is an act, and the receiving of the Communion is 
 the contrary. They are connected only as the two opposite 
 poles, the one of the highest activity, and the other of the 
 highest receptivity. But that, certainly, well considered, says 
 much. Tell me, could we offer ourselves up to God as thankful 
 children of his, if Christ had not lived and died for us ? " 
 
 " Certainly not as children, and therefore not willingly, nor 
 intellectually." 
 
 "Now, consider this," I said; "all the nations before Christ 
 offered sacrifices, the Gentiles as well as the Jews, did they 
 not?" 
 
 " So we read." 
 
 " And were not their sacrifices either those of atonement, in- 
 tended to propitiate the offended Deity, or those of thanksgiving, 
 destined to express thankfulness for benefits received from the 
 propitious Divinity ? " 
 
 " They were." 
 
 " But do you think this intention could ever be perfectly 
 realized ? Must not the dread of punishment, inherent in the 
 feeling of sin and of wrong, have been a hindrance to perfect 
 thankfulness ? And again, could they really find relief iu 
 acts of propitiation, however often repeated, as long as that 
 feeling of thankfulness was not perfect ? " 
 
318 THE APOLOGY OF HIPPOLYTUS, 
 
 " Undoubtedly not." 
 
 " So far, then," I continned, " Jews and Gentiles stood upon 
 the same ground of an unsatisfactory and unsatisfied reh'gious 
 feeling. But Christ did offer himself up to the Father, in 
 perfect love of God and of the brethren ? " 
 
 "That is the foundation of our faith, as we have seen." 
 
 " This, then, was the first perfect sacrifice, or the first satis- 
 factory act of self-devotion." 
 
 *' Such it was, as being the great fact of the world's mental 
 history." 
 
 " "Well, if that be conceded, I must ask a further question. 
 Is it not most natural that the vow of self-sacrifice should be 
 made when we remember that Christ died for us, which we do 
 in the Communion ? " 
 
 " It certainly is ; for otherwise we should show ourselves un- 
 mindful of the cause of our religious peace, and of our con- 
 sciousness of being children of God." 
 
 " This is precisely what we thought in our time ; and as we 
 were very anxious to express this most solemnly, we used 
 always to connect this eucharistic act, or act of thanksgiving, 
 with the celebration of the Lord's Supper, which consequently 
 was itself called the Eucharist or the Thanksgiving. But if the 
 act of the self-sacrifice of the Church (of the united worshippers) 
 cannot be undertaken and consummated without a thankful 
 remembrance of Christ's sacrifice for her, it does not at all 
 follow, that this act cannot be performed in the service except 
 when the Communion is celebrated, that is to say, when there 
 is a congregation of communicants. I confess that seeing what 
 an incredible confusion has flowed from this inseparable con- 
 nection, and, to vise a pathological phrase, what a metastasis of 
 the centre of religious consciousness has been the final con- 
 sequence, I cannot help thinking it would have been better to 
 express and to celebrate that act of thanksgiving not only in the 
 Communion, but also separate from the same, quite by itself, as 
 the real act of worship, the action in the eminent sense, the 
 acme or culminating point of our common devotion. But 
 certainly, in spite of our having given some colour and pretext 
 for such a perversion by the arrangement we came to, you will 
 
HEEDS NOT WHAT BECOMES OF ELEMENTS. 319 
 
 soon find out the truth, if you only study the most ancient 
 records of our holy worship with a little more philosophy than 
 that excellent antiquarian work contains which you are used to 
 consult on the subject. For the act of thanksgiving begins 
 clearly with that old solemn exhortation, ' Lift up your hearts,' 
 and the words which follow have absolutely nothing to do with 
 the Communion as such. Moreover, the ancient liturgies are 
 full of evidence to show that this act was quite distinct from tlie 
 commemoration of Christ's death of atonement, wliich is the 
 Communion. But what I am certain of is, that the fathers of 
 your doctrine, however well they asserted the truth negatively 
 against Callistus' successors, remained, without being aware of 
 it, in the bondage, and, as it were, within the magic circle, of 
 later Rome, in consequence of the method they themselves 
 employed in proving the true doctrine of the Eucharist from 
 Scripture and from the Fathers." 
 
 " This is a hard saying," replied my friends, " against such 
 men as Luther and Calvin and our own Protestant divines, and 
 how do you justify it ? " 
 
 " You shall soon see, and, I hope, say the same," I replied. 
 " Did not the whole controversy of your fathers with the 
 Roman Church turn upon the question, what the consecrated 
 elements (as you call them) become, or do not become, by 
 certain words being spoken over them ? I must be strangely 
 mistaken, if that was not, and is not, the controversial point; 
 for everybody, at Lugdunum as well as here, asks me that 
 question, and I for my life cannot give any answer to it." 
 
 "How ! you say that you cannot answer it?" exclaimed the 
 elder friend, horrified. 
 
 " Indeed, how should I ? Nobody in our time ever put that 
 question to himself or to his neighbour. We offered up, at 
 the celebration of the memory of the Lord's Supper (as the 
 Jews of old did at their daily meals), the fruits of the earth 
 and the produce of the vine as symbols of the sacrifice of our- 
 selves ; but then we considered two of them, bread and wine, 
 according to Christ's command, as the representatives of the 
 body and blood of Christ, that is to say, of the willing sacrifice 
 of Him who died for us, to make us children of God. This 
 
320 THE APOLOGY OF HIPPOLYTUS. 
 
 second view became more and more the predominant and then 
 the exclusive one, the material meal being gradually dropped 
 in the service. The destruction of Jerusalem showed the 
 Christians that the temple-worship was over, that the world 
 was to last longer, and that the sacrifice was destined to become 
 and was becoming already, a reality in mankind, as it had become 
 one in Christ, that it was growing in the thanksgiving, as it was 
 consummated in the atonement. What had always been under- 
 stood was now therefore expressed. The Church, that is to 
 say, the congregation of worshipping believers, offered up herself; 
 but she did so in thankfully remembering Christ's death, as 
 the foundation of her prayer to the Father. 
 
 " Keep to this, and I have no doubt you will at once under- . 
 stand all that the Fathers have said. For however they may 
 have expressed themselves, they must have spoken from this 
 consciousness of the self-sacrifice of the Church as a sacrifice of 
 thankfulness. But this sacrifice was offered up to God through 
 Christ as the High Priest, in the very act of the commemoration 
 of His willing death of love, which is the sacrifice of atonement. 
 We are therefore also entitled to say that the body and 
 blood of Christ, that is to say, the Church, was offered up : 
 but by whom ? by Christ as the head of his Church : and as 
 what ? as thanksgiving. Thus, later Fathers may have said 
 that there was the real presence of Christ in the celebration of 
 the Sacrament ; but how else than in the minds of the faithful 
 luiited into one by the Holy Spirit, and offering their prayer 
 and vow of thankful self-sacrifice ? In all this we and our 
 followers never dreamt of speaking of the perishable elements, 
 which have no more objective reality than subjective. For in 
 excluding this consideration, we were not one-sidedly taking a 
 subjective view, nor could we guess that later dark ages would 
 so entirely lose sight of the centre of Christian consciousness as 
 to mistake matter, subject to corruption, destined for food, for 
 the only objective reality which exists in religion, the incor- 
 ruptible God. 
 
 " The most sober way of stating our view historically would 
 be something like this. There are in truth only two real sacri- 
 fices in the world's history : the Sacrifice of the historical Christ, 
 
THE TWO REAL SACRTFICES. 321 
 
 offered through a life of holiest action and a death of purest love ; 
 and the Sacrifice of the Church, that is to say, of faithful hu- 
 manity in the succession of generations, offering up itself in 
 childlike thankfulness through life and death, and expressing 
 this as the Christian vow in the act of common adoration. Now, 
 as the one sacrifice, the sacrifice of atonement, which the nations 
 before Christ, disturbed in their consciences by sin, and by their 
 consequent estrangement from God, and not initiated in the 
 mystery of eternal love, had vainly and madly endeavoured to 
 achieve, was accomplished by Christ; so the other, which neither 
 could they accomplish, not having in them the feeling of children 
 of the all-loving Father, is in the way of accomplishment, as the 
 great sacrifice of thanksgiving, or of thankful self-devotion, during 
 the course of ages. It is the sign of the growth of the mystical 
 (that is to say, spiritual) body of Christ, of the advancement of 
 the kingdom of God upon earth, of the ever-continuing incor- 
 poration of mankind in God. The Church in the spiritual and 
 intellectual sense of the word, more or less imperfectly repre- 
 sented by the congregations of the faithful, is both the sacri- 
 ficing priest and the victim offered up. For she is the ideal 
 sacrificer, the acting person, acting by the Spirit of Christ in 
 her; and by her reality, by all the individuals worshipping 
 together and making the common vow with individual respon- 
 sibility, she is equally the object offered up. 
 
 " But, if all this be certain (and it is certain), however dif- 
 ferently expressed, we the Fathers, having enacted and tried 
 this sacrifice, and knowing by experience that it was, and must 
 ever be, the centre of Christian religion, in life and in worship, 
 might well be tempted to use the most symbolical phrases in 
 speaking of this mystery of Humanity uniting itself to Divinity. 
 For who, contemplating these mysteries of divine love, this in- 
 tercommunion between God •end man, this continued and un- 
 interrupted pulsation of divine life upon earth through worship 
 fn spirit and truth, would not feel elevated, and, as it were, 
 carried away by so divine a sight? Or who, perceiving, as it 
 were, in his mind this intellectual harmony of the spheres, and 
 joining in the perpetual hymn of mankind which they are offer- 
 ing up as their generations pass through the dark valley of time, 
 
 VOL. 11. Y 
 
322 THE APOLOGY OP HIPPOLYTUS. 
 
 enlightened from above, who, I say, would not feel tempted to 
 use high and mysterious language ? 
 
 " One thing only is as impossible as that the Spirit of God 
 should not be the Spirit of Truth ; the organs of the life of the 
 ancient Church could never think of the Church offering up 
 Christ, who suffered death upon the cross. This would in her 
 eyes have been an absurdity, a contradiction, and a blasphemy. 
 She in Christ, through his Spirit, offered up herself : this was 
 and is, and (mark that well) this ever will be the reality, the 
 great reality, of all life, all history, and all religion. This is the 
 worship in the Spirit, and in truth. This is the reasonable 
 service recommended by the Apostle.^^ As this act was accom- 
 plished in the midst of the celebration of the Lord's Supper, in 
 commemoration of Christ's death, very strong expressions indeed 
 might be used, in the commemorative service, respecting the 
 bodily food prepared for our maintenance, in what may be called 
 the Grace, or the dinner prayer, of the Church. Bread and 
 wine were offered to God objectively, as gifts from His gifts, 
 and subjectively, as symbols of the worshipping faithful, offering 
 up their heart and will. At the same time, too, Christ's sacred 
 words of institution were remembered in the Communion 
 service : ' This is my body,' and, ' This is my blood.' Now 
 with respect to these words (of which the latter is parallel with 
 ' This is the new covenant in my blood '), the offered gifts were 
 also called ' The body and blood of Christ.' Still in this there 
 is no sacrifice, because sacrifice is action, while here is historical 
 commemoration first, bodily receiving afterwards. Pray observe 
 that this difference is an essential one, decisive for the whole 
 character, not of the service only, but of religious thought and 
 action also. If the Church had ever thought that in her act of 
 sacrifice Christ was the victim offered up, she would have lost 
 the sacrifice intrusted to her — her life, and the manifestation of 
 her life — thankful self-devotion. To suppose that by such an 
 act she performed a repetition of the sacrifice of Christ, once 
 and for ever consummated, is to misunderstand her completely. 
 Nothing was ever farther from her thoughts. She would have 
 felt as if she denied Him, the efficacy and perfection of whose 
 atonement she would thus have assumed to re-enact, as it were. 
 
ANCIENT CHURCH CONSECRATED THE PEOPLE. 323 
 
 by a dramatic representation. Indeed you cannot substitute the 
 receiving for the acting, passiveness for activeness, without losing 
 activeness and the act. 
 
 " Certainly, of all the pains and difficulties I encountered at 
 Lugdunum, none were equal to the bewilderment which seized 
 me when I heard them say that the doctrine of the Church had 
 always been, that the Eucharist was a sacrifice of propitiation : 
 whereas I knew, first, that it was no sacrifice whatever, but that 
 its celebration was connected with the self-sacrifice of the 
 Church ; and then, that the propitiation having been made (the 
 feeling of the love of God having been established once and for 
 ever by the propitiatory act of Christ's sacrifice of Himself), the 
 impulse of the Church was, to the end of days, the uninter- 
 rupted offering of self out of thankful love to God and the 
 brethren. Strange discussions followed. At first we did not 
 understand each other at all. Afterwards I found that the 
 prayers of consecration, or the prayers preceding the Commu- 
 nion, had in the wane of the life of the Church, gradually 
 become the principal part of the celebration of the service ; the 
 service being more and more celebrated, though without a com- 
 municating congregation, exactly as if there were a real Com- 
 munion of the congregated faithful. Thus at last I could under- 
 stand how, in the course of centuries, that preparatory act of the 
 commemorative celebration of the Lord's Supper appeared to 
 the reflective mind, taking this to be a divinely established 
 ordinance, as the central thought of the Church, and as the 
 culminating point of her worship. Thus that complete meta- 
 stasis, or change of the centre of consciousness, can be historically 
 explained. 
 
 " The Apostolic Church consecrated by prayer the communi- 
 cants, who devoted body and soul to the Lord : the later Church 
 consecrated the elements, bread and wine. And it was evidently 
 out of this misplaced centre of consciousness that their bishops, 
 assembled in the last great council of the Latin Church, made 
 that awful declaration, which sounds to me like a sentence of 
 death for poor Christianity, or rather like the bell tolling for 
 the dead, as far as the effect of speculative doctrines and litur- 
 gical ordinances can go to pervert the indestructible element of 
 
 Y 2 
 
324 THE APOLOGY OF HIPPOLYTUS. 
 
 truth which is in that solemnity and in the religious feeling of 
 the Christian mind. 
 
 *' Now, do you not see that the whole question of transub- 
 stantiation or no transubstantiation, of real presence or no real 
 presence, is an ' aprosdionyson,' something uncongenial to the 
 sacred subject ? It does not touch the centre of the controversy 
 at all. Looking then on these terms from that consciousness which 
 I had in me, when praying at the altar and receiving or admini- 
 stering the Communion, and which I feel too at this moment as 
 strongly as ever, I say : ' O yes, there is the real presence, the only 
 reality in the spiritual world, Christ is therewith and by his Spirit; 
 and there is a change of substance, of natural will and life into the 
 divine will and life, a change of Self into God. But it is in the 
 faithful worshipper of God in Christ, whether the Sacrament be 
 celebrated or not.' Nor is this a sentimental phrase descriptive 
 of individual feeling, or a materialized symbolism forgetful of the 
 reality, but the great act of God in the life and consciousness of 
 the generations of mankind. As to the elements, elements they 
 are and remain, as the water prayed over remains water in the 
 baptismal bath. Can you imagine that we, the Fathers of the Apo- 
 stolic Church, who had heard the divine Apostle calling upon us to 
 cast off the beggarly elements of the world in the full conscious- 
 ness of the liberty of the children of God, that we, I say, ever 
 thought of such vain speculations, or of combating any such late 
 imaginations ? or will you continue, yourselves, in that low view, 
 merely because your fathers were not quite clear on the philosophy 
 and history of the doctrine of the Sacrament, at the epoch when 
 they returned, divinely inspired, to the evangelic ordinances ? 
 What have you to do with scholastic speculations respecting con- 
 ventional ordinances, generated out of misplaced consciousness, 
 and resting altogether upon misunderstandings ? 
 
 *' But, I repeat, I never will enter into your controversies. 
 You are, or you ought to be, the prophets and teachers of your 
 time — not I. I may be your mirror; I speak as, what I lived 
 and died, a witness of the life of the Church, in the centre of 
 the ancient Western world, one hundred years after the last 
 Apostle died. Let me then sum up what I have said in defence 
 of what appeared to you startling. You must not expect me 
 
NOT A PROTESTANT DIVINE. 325 
 
 to defend the positive part of your eucharistic and of your sacra- 
 mental doctrine altogether, for I cannot help considering that 
 as merely accidental : nor is the Lutheran view in particular so 
 much that of Luther himself as of his dogmatizing and scholas- 
 ticizing followers, he himself having in his earlier writings, on 
 the contrary, expressed better than any one else the real nature 
 of the Christian sacrifice. But if the controversy about the 
 elements was three hundred years ago an imperfection, it is 
 now in every respect an anachronism. Your fathers, in com- 
 bating the Latin Church, placed themselves in that very false 
 centre of consciousness out of which the error had sprung. You 
 cannot mean to do any such thing. Know that if you do, you 
 will be driven into the nets of Rome. But throw away all dis- 
 pute about the elements, and seize the ever-living, the Christian, 
 and Apostolic idea of the everlasting sacrifice of the Church, 
 the real expression of the great mystery of life, and the key 
 to the understanding of Scripture and of the world's history." 
 
 A solemn pause followed. We felt we were brethren, but 
 we also felt that our conversation had reached the point where 
 it ought to stop. Meditation and inquiry were necessary before 
 we could proceed. 
 
 After a while, the younger one of my friends, who had an 
 inquisitive mind, and seemed more advanced in his meditations 
 than appeared at first, asked me a question of which I do not 
 quite understand the drift, but which I could not decline an- 
 swering. 
 
 •' We will consider," he said, " maturely what you have 
 spoken to us so solemnly on this sublime subject. But I am 
 sure you will not think I ask questions out of idle curiosity, if I 
 request you to conclude this our conversation by one word re- 
 specting a certainly very startling, and perhaps most important 
 expression of yours, which relates to what we passed over when 
 touching upon the second article. In some writings, and also 
 in particular in the book the authorship of which you are come 
 
 T 3 
 
326 THE APOLOGY OF HIPPOLYTUS. 
 
 to vindicate, you say that the resurrection is, as it were, one of 
 the sufferings, or at least one of the passive states, if I may say 
 so, of Christ. Do you attach any importance to that opposition 
 between the death and the resurrection ?" 
 
 " One word," I replied, " may indeed suffice to answer that 
 question. I am not aware that I did attach any importance to 
 that distinction. Still, on reflecting upon the subject, I do not 
 think it was merely a rhetorical figure. I was right, I am sure, 
 in distinguishing between what are Christ's actions, his own 
 deeds, the manifestation of his free-acting will and mind, and 
 whatever happened to him or about him, and wherein conse- 
 quently he was passive. This last may be a confirmation of our 
 faith, or a symbolical expression of some ideal truth, but it 
 ought not, I think, to be identified with his life-working, ever 
 life-creating, and regenerating spontaneous actions. They alone 
 have, under the immediate working of God, effected our sal- 
 vation, as far as it is the act of Jesus : their power continues by 
 the sanctifying agency of the Spirit, through saving faith. "We 
 are saved by what Christ did, not by what was done to Him : 
 but what He did, the Father did in Him. What saves us is 
 his free resolution to work our salvation, his actual life of 
 holiness, and, above all, his death of self-sacrifice ; and here 
 again his holy resolution to die, more than all the pains he 
 endured." 
 
 My enlightened Judges, I make a pause here, for I see the 
 time allowed to me is past. I therefore ask whether you will 
 grant me permission to go on for a few minutes longer, and 
 whether you will hear me on my defence respecting my Chris- 
 tian temper and my exclusiveness ? And besides, whether you 
 have yourselves some questions to put to me before you give 
 your verdict? 
 
 I perceive that you will be kind enough to allow me a 
 few minutes more to complete my defence, and I have just 
 
DOES NOT GERMANIZE. 327 
 
 heard a remark, which will give me a good opportunity of 
 passing on to what I have still to say before I conclude my 
 Apology. 
 
 Somebody near me observes, that there is a general impression 
 among you, that I have introduced into the discussion, if not 
 German philosophy, at least German terminology, and that I 
 am considered as one who has himself been bewitched by the 
 siren song of one of those philosophers and philosophical theo- 
 logians. I know that this suspicion will create a strong pre- 
 judice against me in this country, but this must not prevent me 
 from speaking to you with the utmost frankness on this subject 
 also. Let me say first, that they who have hitherto written 
 against the Gei-mans in your country have evidently either not 
 studied them at all (and that indeed I believe to be the case 
 with the greater number), or have not understood the subject- 
 matter of all such speculations : at least if we, the Fathers and 
 the Apostles, ever had any philosophy in us. On the whole, 
 your judgment of these people seems to me strange. You allow 
 that those extraordinary men have reasoned well on many other 
 subjects, and have discovered undoubted truths, both in history 
 and philosophy. But whenever they treat of the highest specu- 
 lative questions, such as the laws of the human mind, you say 
 you do not understand them ; which I find to be a polite En- 
 glish expression implying that you will not listen to them, 
 because you think them mad, or, at least, because you do not 
 care to know anything about the subject itself. And when they 
 begin to reason on divinity, you call them, if very polite, En- 
 thusiasts, if plain-spoken. Pantheists, which with you means 
 Atheists. Now has it never struck you, that what makes the 
 speculation on things divine so unpalatable to you may be your 
 own materialism? This indeed is what other people very gene- 
 rally think. As to myself, I believe I can say with a good con- 
 science that I have essentially told you no more than what I 
 find in myself, and of which I can render you account by my 
 own writings. But as you mention the subject, I will not con- 
 ceal from you, that I have seen on my way to you some good 
 and pious learned men in Germany, who excited my deepest 
 interest by asking me questions which no one else has asked me 
 
 y 4 
 
328 THE APOLOGY OF HIPPOLYTUS. 
 
 either before or since. I confess to you also, that they appeared 
 to me to be men caring most anxiously for Christ and for divine 
 things, since they have evidently sacrificed all worldly consider- 
 ations for their studies; and their zeal, and their profound 
 knowledge of the ancient schools of philosophy in the second 
 and third centuries after Christ, struck me the more, when I 
 considered that the successor of my venerable master Irenseus, 
 at Lugdunum, and all his clergy, did really know very little of 
 the Greek Fathers, and understood nothing of the language 
 in which the glorious martyr of their town had taught and 
 written. 
 
 But, on the other hand, I am free to confess those German 
 Christians puzzled me much in another way. Many of them 
 would never give me a clear and distinct answer, when I put a 
 positive question to them, as to what final consequences they 
 drew from their premises, and as to the connection in their 
 mind between theoretical speculation and the organization of 
 their Church, and in general the wants and demands of their 
 own people. At first I thought they were not in earnest with 
 their convictions. But then I found they considered that 
 scientific thought alone belonged to them, and the consideration 
 of applying these results practically belonged to others, or to 
 other times. Yea, in spite of the evident confusion of their 
 ecclesiastical as well as political affairs, those very persons 
 seemed to think least of all this who devoted their lives to 
 attempting the solution of the most important inquiries into the 
 past. No doubt, there were others, whom I found intent upon 
 carrying out practical and useful Christian ideas ; but then 
 they were generally men of rather narrow minds, and little 
 spirit. Those who pleased me best would sometimes puzzle 
 me incredibly, by endeavouring to make me believe that, as 
 a dogmatic philosopher, I ought myself necessarily to have 
 arrived at, or at least ought to adopt now, those conclusions 
 and that terminology which, they showed me, the councils had 
 made out about that very time when, as I had interpreted the 
 prophecies of our Blessed Apostle, Antichrist would build up 
 the Jewish temple. After all, was I quite so wrong in this 
 guess? But however that be, I told them they would not. 
 
18 PUZZLED BY MUCH IN GERMANY. 329 
 
 after all, when they came to the end, know what to do with 
 those formularies of the later councils. It was all very well 
 when they had found out and demonstrated that there was 
 a thread in all the disputes and formularies following upon the 
 council of Nicasa ; and, having raised certain questions on the 
 relation of the divine and human natures in Christ, they were 
 very naturally driven to decide on their logical consequences, 
 as long as any attempt was made to break through the barrier 
 thus interposed between the consciousness of the earlier Church 
 and that of the later age. There was in the history of those 
 controversies a logical connection, which did not however prove 
 that the final result was anything but what, in our old chemistry, 
 we used to call caput mortuum, or that the formularies were not 
 tombstones of once living ideas. At last I said this : '* My 
 Christian friends, I have quarrelled so much in my former 
 existence, that I have no mind to quarrel even with the 
 successors of Callistus, much less with you, who love Christ 
 so truly, and who show such deep Christian feeling and philo- 
 sophy, and so much sympathy for the thoughts of the ancient 
 Church about the revelation of things divine in and through 
 Christ. But this I will say : till I see more clearly than I 
 can at present, that the terminology of the councils does not 
 obscure to my mind what the prologue of John's Gospel and 
 the glorious passages in Paul's Epistles teach me respecting 
 Christ and the Spirit, I shall abstain from adopting it in prefer- 
 ence to my own expressions, and to those of my blessed master 
 Irenceus." 
 
 One lesson I received from them, for which I hope I am 
 thankful. I felt deeply humbled before them. There was no 
 one, either catholic or heretic, about whom they knew and cared 
 so little as about myself. Some of them had restored most 
 faithfully and successfully the old genuine text of the New 
 Testament which we once read, I as well as Origen : but while 
 they give all the quotations occurring in Origen, they give none 
 of mine. As to myself, personally, they beKeved I was a man 
 of the West, it might be of Portus : but about my further 
 doings, and, in particular, my doctrinal writings, they with few 
 exceptions cared very little, saying they must wait till it was 
 
330 THE APOLOGY OF HIPFOLYTUS. 
 
 more authentically known what I really did say and do. One 
 had made out that I did not write the treatise against Noetus ; 
 another that I was an Alexandrian ! Indeed I think they 
 might have discovered something better. 
 
 Still these men of sober research and Christian thought were 
 by far the best among the Germans I met on my way. For 
 there were others in the South, who seemed to me to be seized 
 with some peculiar mania of overturning Christianity without 
 openly and frankly saying they had given it up, or at least its 
 records. According to them, John's Gospel had been written 
 shortly before Irenaeus wrote : whereas I know positively from 
 Hegesippus and Iren^us, that it was edited by the bishop and 
 elders of Ephesus, who were present at the writing of it, them- 
 selves read it through, and then published it with some remarks 
 of their own. Have I not read and discussed the observations 
 of Basilides and Valentinus upon it, written almost a hundred 
 years before my time ? But still I soon found that the leaders 
 of that school were not only very serious philosophers and 
 deeply learned, but also conscientious men, anxious to find the 
 truth, and that I was quite mistaken when I first thought they 
 would make a fool of me, or were frivolous and irreligious 
 people. I certainly pitied them for plaguing themselves and 
 their readers with suspicions and guesses about deep party 
 schemes and intrigues in the old time, which never existed 
 among the simple, good, old Fathers. But they (and still more 
 their followers) had made a sort of novel or romance of all that, 
 and whoever did not believe in it was a fool or a Jesuit. 
 Altogether they were diflicult to deal with. For, being both 
 learned men and philosophers by profession, they would not 
 hear of anything which was against their theory, whether of 
 argument or fact. When I humbly ventured to observe to 
 them, that they certainly must be wrong in their chronology of 
 the second century, for those were things which I ought to 
 know better, and upon which, besides, I had studied and written 
 expressly, they said, with a smile which seemed to me less 
 Christian than it was forbidding, and in phrases which certainly 
 were neither Apostolic nor Attic : " You had better be quiet, 
 for there is a great doubt whether you ever existed; and if you 
 
DEFENDS HIS TONE IN CONTROVEKSY. 331 
 
 did, whether you are not a confirmed papist, and are not travel- 
 ling now as a Jesuit in disguise, which indeed your coming 
 from Lugdunum is almost sufficient to prove." So I left them 
 with the impression that they were not very civil, but ex- 
 ceedingly confident : as philosophers, they appeared to me men 
 proceeding upon the principle of placing, for the sake of 
 experiment, every thing on its head, in order to set it right. 
 The fact is, they were anxious to get rid of an old system, and 
 thought they could not succeed without entering upon their 
 inadmissible hypotheses, and thus they fell into uncritical 
 hypercriticism. That Christianity is not a system for speculation, 
 but a message for life, and that knowledge is to be tested by life, 
 and religion by an humble feeling of our own imperfection and 
 deficiency, and of the sinful nature of Self, of all this they 
 seemed to have entirely lost sight, some even of the reality 
 of sin. 
 
 Thus you see, whatever may be the merit of my speculations, 
 they are not borrowed from the Germans, but are my own. If 
 I have, with your own approval, here and there adopted their 
 terminology, I have done so because it appeared reasonable : 
 and, at all events, nobody among you knew how to propose a 
 better, which we might have adopted in preference. 
 
 I think I have succeeded in apologizing in some manner for 
 what you were disposed to deride as my fanciful interpretations, 
 and in justifying what you suspect to be incorrect in my doctrine 
 and terminology. But now I understand you doubt of my 
 being a good Christian for another reason, and that is one which 
 goes very near my heart. I have heard some of you say that, 
 if I did indeed write that book, I must have been an ill-tempered 
 man, as I made use of very strong and angry words against my 
 own bishop. Others say that in my controversies I am much 
 too exclusive : an objection indeed akeady implied in the former 
 one. Allow me to defend myself against both charges. I would 
 say, in the first place, that I spoke not against Callistus, as the 
 bishop of Rome (I myself being, by the by, a bishop as well as 
 
332 THE APOLOGY OF HIPPOLYTUS. 
 
 himself), but because he was a tyrant and an oppressor of our pres- 
 bytery ; and that I judged him so severely, not simply because 
 he was a heretic, but because he was dishonest. As to the 
 other points, let us consider a little what we mean by heretic. 
 The successors of Callistus (as I understand) consider every 
 man a heretic who will not acknowledge as true, in point of fact 
 and in philosophy, every thing that they have made into 
 doctrine : even though he should accept, or be ready to accept, 
 what in those old councils the majority of bishops have laid 
 down as true, and as necessary to be believed under pain of 
 eternal damnation. As for those who will not acknowledge the 
 supreme authority of the bishop of Rome over all Churches (of 
 which even Callistus did not dream), they are called by the 
 bishop of Rome, as I hear, schismatics, and are looked upon as 
 equally separated from the body of the Church. Now I certainly 
 never went so far, although I am aware I extended the ancient 
 notions of heresy in my own controversies. But the ancient 
 heretics were men of a very different sort. They placed in 
 jeopardy not speculations, but the very existence of Christianity ; 
 for either they did not acknowledge the authority of the evan- 
 gelical and apostolical writings at all, introducing instead false 
 books of their own making, or else they mutilated the Scrip- 
 tures, interspersing them with extracts from other books in 
 support of some favourite speculative scheme. Their sole inten- 
 tion was to substitute for the whole community of believing 
 people (which we at that time used to call the Church, and 
 which you now call a Christian nation), a philosophical sect, 
 privileged on account of their superior knowledge. Instead of 
 our simple worship, our short prayers, our plain and popular 
 homilies on evangelical and Apostolical texts ; instead of our 
 symbolic baptism, preceded by solid Christian instruction and by 
 the evidence of a Christian life, conferred after a solemn and 
 public confession of faith ; instead of our brotherly feasts of 
 love, and our humble sacrifice of thanksgiving and of self, that 
 ever-continuing sacrifice of redeemed mankind, offered up and 
 to be offered up in remembrance of Christ's atoning death ; — 
 instead of all this, they introduced unintelligible formularies, 
 full of superstitious words ; they invented fanciful baptisms. 
 
QUESTION RESPECTING INTOLERANCE. 333 
 
 and used orgies borrowed from heathen mysteries, which soon 
 degenerated into the most impure and abominable practices. 
 Thus we and our fathers had not to fight either for our own 
 speculations, or against mere systems of pantheism and mytho- 
 logical fancies; nor did we defend our power and jurisdiction 
 only ; we fought absolutely for the existence of the Christian 
 Church. I confess at the same time that my more recent 
 adversaries, the Noetians, and still more the Montanists 
 and the poor unmanageable Quartodecimans, certainly stood 
 with us on evangelical ground. So that all I have to blame 
 myself for is, the having treated as heretics some men and 
 parties of my own time, or the age immediately preceding me, 
 who were indeed not at issue with us on any vital and essential 
 point. I plead guilty at once. I own I was wrong: I ought 
 not to have done so. 
 
 But, my dear brethren, let there be truth between us. Will 
 you pardon me, if I remind you of what the Saviour said re- 
 specting the beam and the mote in the eye ? Are you sure that 
 you are not doing the very same thing, and perhaps worse ? Do 
 your laws not exclude all your foreign Protestant brethren from 
 the use of your churches ? and do you not (so far as you identify 
 yourselves with the majority of your clergy) exclude, or at least 
 assume the right of excluding, from the universal Church 
 (which is communion with Christ), all the Protestant Churches 
 on the Continent, even those from which your fathers gloried 
 that they received their principles, and whose tenets they 
 adopted when at last they took courage to declare openly their 
 religious opinions under the tyranny of a wicked prince ? And 
 why ? Because those nations have not adopted that episcopal 
 form of government which is yours, a form disliked by the others 
 exactly because you make an idol of it, and because it renders 
 you so superstitious and exclusive. Are you not, in doing so, 
 or in allowing your clergy to do so, more tyrannical than even 
 Callistus was, or his successors are ? For they are consistent, 
 you contradict your own principles ; they are exclusive froni 
 necessity, you by choice ; they never accepted the paramount 
 authority of Scripture, you do. 
 
 I correct myself: you laymen do not think and feel so. I 
 
334 THE APOLOGY OP HIPPOLYTUS. 
 
 never found one in a hundred of the laity who really did : most 
 of them, on the contrary, lamented, as much as I do, that one 
 half of your clergy are come to so narrow a view of Christianity, 
 and that your laws themselves are so imperfect and insular. 
 Therefore against their intolerance alone have I spoken these 
 words : and even against them only in my defence. 
 
 And now I leave my case in your hands. Whatever you 
 may think of me and of my equals and betters, know that we 
 were frail and imperfect beings, such as you are. But do not 
 forget one thing. Whatever we knew or knew not, and what- 
 ever were or were not our faults and our sins of commission or 
 omission, we did not talk Christ and Christianity, but we lived 
 them.*^ And when the liberties of the world were gone, when 
 Stoic despair was all that seemed left of belief in self-re- 
 sponsibility and of faith in the moral government of human 
 affairs, we the Christians resolved not to do what we thought 
 against our conscience. We sought no subterfuge when the 
 men in power said we must sacrifice to the idols, in obedience 
 to the laws of the state : we said those laws are unjust, because 
 they are against the light of the Spirit and the law of God, 
 which is in Scripture and in us. We said so, knowing such 
 conduct was death, even in the eyes of a Pliny and a Trajan : 
 and we died. So I too lived and died for the saving faith ; and, 
 in doing so, I then felt, and I have known since, that I was 
 blessed.'^ 
 
 I died for our common faith in Christ, I died to satisfy my 
 conscience, and in the hour of death I looked up to my heavenly 
 Father, and to his eternal kingdom of truth and of liberty. 
 But I now see, as you might know, that, by my confession and 
 martyrdom, I have contributed my share towards laying the 
 foundation of that civil and religious liberty which you in this 
 land are enjoying, and for which, I hope and trust, you are, and 
 ever will be, sincerely thankful. 
 
 For remember, and such shall be my parting prophetic word 
 to you, remember that you would not possess this liberty, if the 
 
HIS PARTING PROPHETIC WORD. 335 
 
 Christian martyrs had not rendered to humanity that self-respect 
 which is founded on respect for the truth in God, and for the 
 divine dignity of his image on earth ; nor unless they had given 
 the example of that courage, which springs from love for man- 
 kind as our brethren. By that faith and by that courage we 
 educated you and the whole Germanic race, when you entered, 
 youthful but ignorant, upon the stage of the world, the face of 
 which you were destined to renew. Remember also, that you 
 would not have been able to secure to yourselves, and to the 
 world, the liberties you now enjoy, unless your fathers had 
 risked their lives and shed their blood for the maintenance of 
 these same principles, three hundred years ago. 
 
 And now, be worthy of your fathers and true to yourselves, 
 and fear not the issue of the great religious and social struggle 
 which is drawing near. The enemies of liberty of conscience, 
 who wish to use the civil liberties you have so dearly gained, 
 for introducing again sacerdotal encroachment and tyranny, are 
 impotent, if you combat them with the weapons of the Spirit 
 and of Light. Their days "are numbered. The history of the 
 world runs against them like a mighty spring-flood of heaven. 
 Their failure and their judgment are written with letters of 
 blood in the history of the world down to this your day. They 
 have no living root in the past and present, and none therefore 
 in the future. The present state of that world which they 
 have taught and influenced cries to heaven against them with 
 blood and tears and sighs ; and the confusion around them 
 becomes every day more and more confounded. They sowed 
 the counter-reformation three hundred years ago, and they 
 have reaped revolutions wherever that seed took root : they 
 lighted up civil war and kept it burning for one hundred and 
 fifty years ; and now, wherever they reign, there is rebellion, 
 anarchy, or tyranny : they are at this moment sowing a bloody 
 counter-revolution, and they will reap destruction. They 
 suppressed or spoiled the first Reformation, which was com- 
 pelled to fight them with only the scanty light that they had 
 provided, and with the crippled resources that they had left to 
 the human mind. Thus, the first Reformation itself remained 
 crippled and maimed, among you and everywhere else. Since 
 
336 THE APOLOGY OF HIPPOLYTUS. 
 
 that great event, the European nations have been occupied in 
 forming a free polity out of the traditions of Byzantine and 
 modern despotism, into which they had been gradually sinking : 
 for with the present world, as with the ancient, despotism is 
 new, and liberty old. 
 
 But the times are changed. The apostles of darkness cannot 
 stand the second Reformation, which draws near in the armour 
 of Divine Light, and with the weapons of eternal conscious 
 reason ; which is fortified by science, philosophy, and authentic 
 history ; the approach of which is anticipated and hailed by 
 the universal longing of nations, yearning after Christ and 
 evangelical truth and liberty. The second Reformation advances, 
 not by revolutionary infidelity as they pretend, but in spite of 
 that universal scepticism and unbelief which their unholy 
 impositions, forgeries, and frauds have prepared and fostered in 
 the finest countries of the world. The second Reformation will 
 conquer, not by exciting wars or fomenting revolutions, but 
 peaceably, and in spite of the bloody disturbances grown out of 
 the infidelity sown by its enemies ; not by flattering the popular 
 mind, but in spite of the reaction called forth by late re- 
 volutionary movements in many noble, but timid minds, ready 
 to catch at anything which promises them the support of 
 religious authority. 
 
 Fear not any of these obstacles. The history of the world 
 advances under laws, as eternal, positive, and unchangeable, as 
 those by which the heavenly bodies move, but more sublime and 
 divine ; because they are the direct and conscious expression of 
 that mind which is eternal reason and love. Neither fear ye 
 the apostles of irreligion and antichristianism, who go about 
 preaching to the nations the emancipation of animal life as the 
 liberty and happiness of man and of woman, and mad pantheism 
 as the religion of the future. They are already sinking under 
 the weight of their own wickedness and folly, and beneath the 
 indignation and contempt of all nations. Show yourselves 
 faithful, by believing that there is no wisdom but in Christ, and 
 that no one has the Spirit of God and its power, except him 
 who calling Jesus Lord and Master is an humble follower of 
 His holy life. Those who deify sinful humanity are the worst 
 
HIS FAREWELL EXHORTATION. 337 
 
 of idolaters, because they not only blaspheme the name of God, 
 but profane the image of the most Holy on earth : they will 
 share the fate of all idolaters ; doomed by their own consciences, 
 they will perish in madness or idiotcy. 
 
 But ye, the children of light, go fearlessly onward. To 
 imagine a return of mankind to that infantine state, in which 
 tradition and revelation are received as things external to man, 
 is like seeking in the wilderness for Christ, who is near you 
 and in you. Such a return is neither desirable nor possible. 
 You have not to choose between faith and reason, nor between 
 superstition and irreligion. But you have to make your choice 
 between light and darkness. On that side are indifference, 
 scepticism, servitude, and all the other attendant nightmares of 
 humanity ; on this side, self-responsibility, faithful inquiry, 
 liberty, all the attending genii of light. 
 
 The first natural day of reformed theology and Protestant 
 Church government is gone. Children of light ! sit not in 
 darkness and sleep not the sleep of death. Light your torches 
 at that intellectual sunbeam in Scripture and within yourselves, 
 which both nature and universal history majestically reflect; 
 and awaken the dawn of the young day of the earth by 
 intellectual hymns of praise, responded to by a life of self- 
 sacrificing love for the growth and advancement of truth and 
 justice among mankind, the only, but the indestructible, found- 
 ation of social union, of political freedom, and of all earthly 
 happiness. 
 
 And with these words, I bid you farewell. 
 
 VOL. n. 
 
NOTES or THE EDITOR 
 
 TO 
 
 THE APOLOGY OF HIPPOLYTUS. 
 
 Note to Title. 
 
 THE IDES OF AUGUST, TIIK DATE OF THE DEPOSITION OF THE 
 REMAINS OF ST. HIPPOLYTUS. 
 
 The Ides of August are the day on which, in Rome, from very 
 ancient times, tlie memory of Ilippolytus, the bishop of Portus and 
 presbyter of Rome, was celebrated. "We must in this case, as in many 
 others, not lay too much stress on the expression "dies natalis," which 
 originally meant the day of martyrdom or confession. For very often, 
 and particularly in the primitive times of the Church of Rome, the 
 day celebrated was the " dies depositionis," or the day when the 
 bones of the martyr and confessor were deposited in one of the 
 Christian cemeteries of the city, and therefore principally in those 
 " ad Catacumbas," afterwards called Coemeterium Callisti, on the 
 Appian road, near the present Church of St. Sebastian. I have 
 shown, in the " Description of Rome " (vol. ii. Description of the old 
 basilica of St. Peter), that as to the two princes of the Apostles, St. 
 Peter and St, Paul, this results from the explicit evidence of bishop 
 Damasus himself, and the collateral reports. The 'proof, in our 
 present case, is contained in the vei'y words of the old Roman Mar- 
 tyrologium (Fabric, i. p. xx.) : " Idibus Augusti (13. Aug.) Romte, 
 natalis Sanctorum Hippohjti Martyris, Pontiani Episcopi, Cornelii," 
 &c. The old Calendars published by Muratori in his Liturgia Ro- 
 mana all give the same date. 
 
 We know from the most ancient authentic record of the Cluirch 
 of Rome, the "Catalogus Liberianus " of the year 354 (I have given 
 the text of the passage in the Letters), that Pontianus died an 
 
340 NOTES TO THE ArOLOGY, 
 
 exile in Sardinia, on the 28th September, of the first year of Maxi- 
 minus, which corresponds to the year 235 of our era. Now, the very 
 circumstance that one and the same day is mentioned as "dies natalis" 
 for a number of saints, shows that this expression is incorrect ; but 
 not at all that it is in every case mythical and a fiction. Possibly 
 there may have been an earlier deposition in the Catacumbce, for an 
 ancient Martyrologium has the following : 
 
 "8. Id. Aug. (6- Aug.) Romse coemeterii Callisti via Appia, natalis 
 Sixti Episcopi, et Felicissimi Agapeti, Donatiani, Fausti, Pretextati, 
 Laurentii, Hippolyti." 
 
 Still, the authority quoted is not sufficiently weighty to remove all 
 doubt of its authenticity ; whereas the deposition in the cemetery in 
 the Ager Veranus, on the Tiburtine road, where the basilica of St. 
 Laurentius stands, is attested already fifty years before Prudentius, as 
 we have seen, by the Calendarium of the year 354. 
 
 The date now fixed for the festival of St. Hippolytus by the Ro- 
 man Catholic Church, the 22nd of August (xi. Kal. Sept.), is conse- 
 quently quite arbitrary. Indeed, it is of very late date, and perhaps 
 rests only on the authority of Baronius. The prayers relating to St. 
 Hippolytus, not only in the Gregorian Sacramentary, but also in those 
 of Gelasius and Leo (or Felix III.), are all for the Ides of August. 
 It is, therefore, quite accurate, that the day of commemoration ought 
 to be the 13th of August. And, indeed, this date has been adopted 
 in the official Christian calendar of Prussia, which, for the first time, 
 has realized the idea of Luther as to the names and lives of the saints 
 in the calendar. There the Christian reader will findNicolaus Count 
 Zinzendorf by the side of Hippolytus, and the days of the demise of 
 William Wilberforce and of Ehzabeth Fry by the side of those of St. 
 Benedict and Sta. Scholastica. Dr. Piper has added to these names 
 of Christian heroes and heroines popular but critically sifted accounts 
 respecting their lives, substituting for the charm of fable the holier 
 one of true historj'. So much for German infidelity on this score ! 
 
 Note 1. p. 255. 
 
 THE THREE HIPPOLYTUSES WHOM THE CHURCH OF ROME HAS MADE 
 OUT OF THE ONE. 
 
 This curious fact is proved by the comparison of the account of 
 Prudentius with the official documents of the Church of Rome. The 
 " Mai'tyrologium Romanum " (edited by command of Pope Gregory 
 
NOTES TO THE ArOLOGY, 841 
 
 XIIL, and revised by order of Urban VIII.) has the following three 
 articles, in which we distinguish by Italics the circumstances occui*ring 
 in the account of Prudentius : 
 
 " 1. Tertio Kal. Febr. (30. Jan.) Antiochiae passio beati Hippolyti 
 Presbyteri, qui Novati schismate aliquantulam deceptus, sed operimte 
 gratia Christi correctus, ad unitatem Ecclesias rediit, pro qua et in qua 
 ix)stea illustre martyrium consumraavit. Hie rogatus a suis, qutenam 
 secta verior esset, execratus dogma Novati, eamfidem dicens esse ser- 
 vandum, quam Petri cathedra custodiret, ]agvi\\xra prtebuit. 
 
 "2. Idib. August! (13. August). Romo3 beati Hippolyti martyris 
 qui pro confessionis gloria sub Valeriano Imperatore, post alia tor- 
 menta, ligatis pedibus ad colla indomitorum equorum per carduetum 
 et tribulos crudeliter tractus, toto corpore laceratus emisit spiritum. 
 
 " 3. Undecimo Kal. Sept. (22. Aug.) In Porta Romana S. Hippo- 
 lyti Episcopi eruditione clarissimi, qui sub Alexandra Imperatore ob 
 praeclaram fidei confessionem manibus pedibusque ligatis in altam fo- 
 veam aquis plenam prcecipitatus, martyrii palmam accepit : cujus cor- 
 pus a Christianis apud eundem locum sepultum fuit." 
 
 The account of the mode of martyrdom is taken from the Greek 
 legend published in the "Acta Martyrum sub Claudio Gothico/' which 
 I have had so often occasion to quote in the First Volume. There 
 may have been no harm intended by all this : such confusions happen 
 continually, not by fraud, but by the insufficiency of knowledge, and 
 the injury of time. But there certainly is harm in the tyranny, first 
 of canonizing legends into truth ; and secondly, of declaring infallible 
 the canonizing authority ; for, if legends are made truth, truth will, 
 sooner or later, be thought a legend, and liistorical belief superstition. 
 And that is the case in Southern Europe. 
 
 Note 2. p. 258. 
 
 THE PRESENT SUCCESSOR OF ST. IREN^US. 
 
 HiPPOLYTUS evidently alludes to the present Cardinal de Bonald, 
 bishop of Lyons, son of tlie celebrated De Bonald, who was a peer of the 
 Eestoration, and author of many theocratic and hierarchical writings. 
 The cardinal-bisliop is known by his pastoral Letter or Mandement, of 
 1842, about the Immaculate Conception of the Virgin Mary, and her 
 worship ; and by another of 1848, recommending the willing accept- 
 ance of the Republic. It is at Lyon--, since the Restoration, that th3 
 
 z 3 
 
342 NOTES TO THE APOLOGY. 
 
 central committee of the Roman Catholic Missions in France resides, 
 which, according to some published accounts, disposes yearly of some 
 millions of francs. 
 
 Note 3. p. 258. 
 
 THE DEAN OF THE SACRED COELEGE. 
 
 This evidently must have been meant in the sense of " Doyen d'age:" 
 for the " Decano del Sagro Collegio " is always the cardinal-bishop of 
 Ostia. Different passages of the Liber Pontificalis prove that the 
 bishop of Portus was one of the three suburban bishops who assisted 
 the bishop of Ostia in consecrating the elect bishop of Rome. 
 
 Note 4. p. 259. 
 
 THE WORKS AND MONUMENTS OF PROTESTANTISM. 
 
 The reproach here made against Protestantism is very hackneyed in 
 the whole school of the French hierarchical authors, as De Maistre, in 
 bis book " Du Pape," and the elder De Bonald. The same song has 
 been sung, ad nauseam, by the English converts to Romanism. Their 
 leader was the late Mr. Pugin, an ingenious architect, who humo- 
 rously ridiculed the pigtail style, forgetting only that the decay of 
 good taste in the churches and monuments, during the last 250 years, 
 had its origin in Italy, through the influence of the Jesuits ; and who, 
 upon honest inquiry, would have discovered that the spirit of restora- 
 tion, both in architecture and music, sprung everywhere from Protes- 
 tant Germany, as well as that movement which, fifty years ago, led to 
 the revival of historical painting. 
 
 Note 5. p. 260. 
 
 CICERO's PROPHECY OF THE ENGLISH CONSTITUTION AND OF ITS 
 
 HISTORY. 
 
 CiCERO (De Republica, lib. i.), after having established that there 
 are three kinds (genera) of governments, the regal (regium), the aris- 
 tocratic (optimatium), and the popular (populare), and that each is apt 
 
NOTES TO THE APOLOGY. 343 
 
 to degenerate and to bring on great convulsions, has the following 
 words, which nobody in our days will read without serious reflections. 
 (Cap. xxix.) "Miri sunt orbes et quasi circuitus in rebus publicis 
 commutationum et vicissitudinum : quos cum cognosse sapientis est, 
 turn vei'o prospicere impendentes in gubernanda re publica, moderan- 
 tem cursum atque in sua potestate retinentem, magni cujusdam civis 
 et divini paene est viri. Itaque quartum quoddam genus rei public* 
 maxime probandum esse sentio, quod est ex his, qu£e prima dixi, mo- 
 
 deratum et permixtum tribus (Cap. xxxv.) " Turn 
 
 Laelius, quid tu, inquit, Scipio ? Ex tribus istis quid maxime probas ? 
 — ;S^. Recte quccris quid maxime e tribus ; quoniam eorum nullum 
 ipsum per se separatum probo ; anteponoque singulis illud, quod, con- 
 flatum fuerit ex omnibus. Sed si unum ac simplex probandum sit, 
 regium probem atque in primis laudem. In primo autem genere quod 
 hoc loco appellatur, occurrit nomen quasi patrium regis, ut ex se natis 
 ita consulentis suis civibus, et eos conservantis studiosius quam redi- 
 gentis in servitutem : ut sane utilius sit facultatibus et mente exiguos 
 sustentari unius optimi et summi viri diligentia. Adsunt optimates, qui 
 se melius hoc idem facere profiteantur ; plusque fore dicant in pluribus 
 consilii quam in uno, et eandem tamen asquitatem et fidem. Ecce 
 autem maxima voce clamat populus, neque se uni neque paucis velle 
 parere; libertate ne feris quidem quidquam esse dulcius; hac omnes 
 carere sive regi sive optimatibus serviant. Ita caritate nos capiunt 
 reges, consilio optimates, libertate populi : ut in comparando difficile 
 
 ad eligendum sit quid maxime velis 
 
 (Cap. xlv.) " Quod ita cum sit, ex tribus primis generibus longe praj- 
 stat mea sententia regium ; regio autem ipsi praestabit id quod erit 
 tequatum et temperatum ex tribus optimis rerum publicarum modis. 
 Placet enim esse quiddam in re publica prajstans et regale ; esse 
 aliud auctoritati principum patrum adtributum ; esse quasdam res 
 servatas judicio voluntatique multitudinis. Hcec constitutio primum 
 habet ^equabllitatem quandam magnam, qua carere diutius vix possunt 
 liberi ; deinde firmitudinem, quod et ilia prima facile in contraria vitia 
 convertuntur, ut exsistat ex rege dominus, ex optimatibus factio, ex 
 populo turba et confusio ; quodque genera ipsa generibus sa^pe com- 
 mutantur no vis. Hoc in hac juncta moderateque permixta conforma- 
 tione rei publicie non fermc sine magnis principum vitiis evenit. Non 
 est enim causa conversionis, ubi in suo quisque est gradu firmiter col- 
 locatus, et non subest, quo prsecipitet ac decidet." (Text after Osann, 
 without the archaic orthography.) The " quiddam prsestans et 
 regale " is evidently the Latin for " the royal prerogative." For the 
 
 z 4 
 
344 NOTES TO THE APOLOGY, 
 
 last of these passages Mai quotes Polyb. vi, 3. : but the father of the 
 whole idea is Aristotle, in his "Politics" : see, in particular, iv. 6. 7. 
 (al. 8. 9.) 
 
 Note 6. p. 265. 
 
 THE WIFE AND CHILDREN OF ST. HIPPOLYTUS. 
 
 The particulars here given are, of course, part of the fiction ; but that 
 Hippolytus might have had, and probably had, a wife and children, 
 for which he might now be ridiculed by ignorant and malicious men 
 as bishop Alexander was in our time, both in France and England, 
 is an indisputable fact of ecclesiastical history ; as we have shown 
 in our First Volume. I take this opportunity of expressing my 
 conviction that the tradition respecting St. Paul's having been a 
 widower is true. 
 
 Note 7. p. 265. 
 
 THE INSCEIPTION OF HERON BELONGING TO THE TEMPLE OF SERAPIS 
 AT PORTUS, OF THE TIME OF HIPPOLYTUS. 
 
 Under Severus, there lived at Portus a certain Heron, who in the 
 inscription on a marble pedestal found at Portus, is mentioned as 
 ve<jjic6pos or cBdituus of the temple of Serapis in that place. This 
 inscription is published in Sponii Miscellanea eruditae Antiquitatis 
 (Fabr. in Hipp. i. 47.) : 
 
 Map/cov AvprjXiov '2.eovi]pov ' A\EL,ar^pov tvTV)(^ovg evaE^ovg Koi 'lowXi'ac 
 Ma^at'ac SeSaorJ/c [x-qxpoQ Att HXt'w fieyaXu) SapaTr/^i Kal role ffwraoig 
 Beolg M. AvpijXiog'llpiov l^ewtcopog rov kv Tioprio 'LapairiZog evri Aap- 
 yiviu) BfiT-aXt'wi't apj^ivTrepeTH] kcu KafiaiPEvrr] Kal AvprjXiw $//€« Kai 
 ^aXwviu) QeihoTo) hpotpwpoig Kal Kaf.iEireiiTaig Xapir)) lEpodovXeiaavidTjKey 
 iiri ayadd), 
 
 Du Cange has endeavoured to identify this Heron with a Heron 
 " confessor et philosophus," who is mentioned with Hippolytus as 
 chronographer. This is whimsical for a historian. 
 
NOTES TO THE ArOLOGY. 345 
 
 Note 8. p. 266. 
 
 CALLISTUS' RESIDENCE IN TRASTEVERE. 
 
 The church of S. Calisto at Rome, near to S. Maria in Trastevere, 
 with the Convento di S. Calisto by its side, is given as the place 
 where that bishop, as the legend says, took refuge in the time of per- 
 secution, and where he was thrown out of the window. (Beschreibung 
 der Stadt Rom, iii. C. p. 672—677.) 
 
 Note 9. p. 267. 
 
 HIPPOLYTUS ON THE PARAMOUNT AUTHORITY OF SCRIPTURE. 
 
 See the proofs given in the Letters and in the Essay. 
 Note 10. p. 269. 
 
 THE PUNCTUATION OF THE FIRST VERSES OF THE PROLOGUE OF 
 
 ST. John's gospel. 
 
 All ancient authorities prove that the third and fourth verses were 
 written thus : 
 
 " All things were made by Him, and without Him was not any 
 tiling made. What was made is life in Him, and the life was the 
 light of men." 
 
 The present punctuation was adopted in order to combat the heresy of 
 the Macedonians, towards the end of the fourth century. Thus it has 
 all tradition and ancient authorities against it. A deeper insight into 
 the meaning of those sublime and, to a Christian philosopher, per- 
 fectly intelligible words, will show to the Christian reader that the 
 internal evidence is as great as the externaL The first words ("In 
 the beginning was the Word," &c.) speak of the immanent external 
 existence of the Word as God (as God's Thought of himself). Then 
 comes the demiurgic or world-creating function of the Word, in the 
 beginning of the third verse. It remains, therefore, to speak of the 
 agency of the Word in the created universe. Here the Apostle says, 
 first, that it is the principle of life in the outer world (the infinite 
 
346 NOTES TO THE APOLOGY, 
 
 factor in nature) ; and equally was (originally) tlie intellectual prin- 
 ciple in man (the infinite factor in the mind), enabling man to under- 
 stand (when born anew) things divine and his own origin. More on 
 this subject is said in the Philosophical Outlines. 
 
 Note 11. p. 270. 
 
 THE CANON OF THE NEW TESTAMENT IN THE ROMAN CTIUKCII IN 
 THE AGE OF HIPPOLYTUS. 
 
 See the proofs in the Essay on this subject. 
 
 Note 12. p. 272. 
 
 THE BELIEF OF HIPPOLYTUS IN THE FACTS OF CLAIRVOYANCE, AND 
 HIS WISE JUDGMENT UPON THIS SUBJECT. 
 
 Of the Montanist prophetesses Hippolytus speaks in his great work. 
 As to his belief in the facts connected with what is now called mag- 
 netism, I have shown it to be more than probable in my chapter on 
 the Treatise on the Charismata, or Gifts of the Holy Spirit, that 
 the Essay with which both texts of the eighth book of the " Apo- 
 stolical Constitutions " open, represents substantially the introductory 
 part of a book of Hippolytus on the Apostolic tradition respecting 
 the Charismata. In this extract, his opinion on such points is distinctly 
 stated. 
 
 Note 13. p. 3U. 
 
 THE PASSAGE OF HIPPOLYTUS AS TO THE SACRIFICE IN THE 
 EUCHARIST. 
 
 The original text runs thus (Hipp. 0pp. i. 282.): 'HroifxaaaTo 
 Ti)v lavTiig Tpdir e^ay rrjv lT:iyvix)<nv rrjg ityiag Tpia^oQ KaTevrayyeX- 
 \ofjiivr]v, Kat to rijXLOV koX a'^pavTOv avrov awfia Kal aifxa, airep Iv rp 
 fXviTTiKTJ Kul ^ei(f Tpaivi'Cr] kuO' eKa.aTi]V iTnTtKovvTcu ^vojjiEva elg a.va~ 
 ixvqcFLi' tT]q a.EijJiyi]aTOv Kcu TrpwTi]Q iKelvrjQ rpmre^rjc rov pvariKov Bn'ov 
 
 dUTTVOV. 
 
NOTES TO THE APOLOGY. 347 
 
 Note 14. p. 322. 
 
 THE christian's ONLY SACRIFICE THE SPIRITUAL. 
 
 I GIVE in the Essays on the Christian sacrifice the striking passages 
 in the Fathers, from Justin Matyr and Irena3us down to St. Augustin. 
 I cannot refrain from transcribing here the beautiful words of the 
 "Octavius" of M. Minucius Felix, a younger contemporary of 
 Hippolytus (ch. 32.) : 
 
 "Putatis autem nos occultare quod colimus, si delubra et aras non 
 habemus ? Quod enim simulacrum Deo fingam, cum, si recte exis- 
 times^ sit Dei homo ipse simulacrum ? Templum quod ei exstruam, 
 cum totus hie mundus ejus opere fabricatus eum capere non possit? 
 et cum homo latius maneam, intra unam aidiculam vim tantte majes- 
 tatis includam ? Nonne melius in nostra dedicandus est mente ? in 
 nostro immo consecrandus est pectore ? Hostias et victimas Domino 
 offeram, quas in usum mei protulit, ut rejiciam ei suum munus ? 
 ingratum est ; cum sit litabilis hostia bonus animus et pura mens et 
 sincera sententia. Igitur qui innocentiam colit, Deo supplicat ; qui 
 justitiam, Deo libat : qui fraudibus abstinet, propitiat Deum : qui 
 hominem periculo subripit, optimam victimam ca3dit. Ilasc nostra 
 sacrificia, hgec Dei sacra sunt : sic apud nos religiosior est ille qui 
 j ustior." 
 
 Note 15. p. 334. 
 
 THE ANCIENT CHRISTIANS DID NOT TALK CHRIST AND CHRISTIANITY, 
 BUT LIVED THEM. 
 
 In reading the " Octavius " over again, I find that this phrase ex- 
 presses, almost verbatim, the concluding words of his peroration. He 
 says (ch. 39.) : " Nos non habitu sapientiam sed mente pra^ferimus, 
 non eloquimur magna sed vivimus, gloriamur nos consecutos quod illi 
 (Groecorum philosophi) summa inteutione quoesiverunt nee invenire 
 potuerunt. Quid ingrati sumus ? quid nobis invidemus, si Veritas 
 divinitatis nostri temporis tetate maturuit ? Fruamur bono nostro, et 
 recti sententiam temperemus, cohibeatur superstitio, impietas expietur, 
 vera religio reservetur." 
 
348 NOTES TO THE APOLOGY. 
 
 Note 16. p. 334. 
 
 THE MARTYRS DIED FOR THE LIBERTY OP MANKIND. 
 
 This is what Minucius Felix preaches in his " Apology " (ch. 36, 37.) : 
 " Sit Fortis Fortunoe (eventus) : mens tamen libera est, et ideo actus 
 hominis, non dignitas judicatur .... Ceterum quod plerique pau- 
 peres dicimur, non est infamia nostra, sed gloria ; animus enim ut 
 luxu solvitur, ita frugalitate firmatur. Et tamen quis potest pauper 
 esse qui non eget, qui non inhiat alieno, qui Deo dives est ? Magis 
 jjauper ille est, qui cum multa habeat, plura desiderat .... Igiturut 
 qui viam terit, eo felicior quo levior incedit, ita beatior in hoc itinere 
 vivendi qui paupertati se sublevat, non sub divitiarum onere suspirat 
 .... Ut aurum ignibus, sic nos discrirainibus arguimur. Quam 
 pulchrum spectaculum Deo, cum Christianus cum dolore congreditur ! 
 cum adversum minas et supplicia et tormenta componitur ! cum strc- 
 pitum mortis et horrorem carnificis arripiens ineulcat ! cum liberta- 
 tem suam odversus reges et principes erigit, soli Deo, ciijus est, cedit! 
 cum triumphator et victor ipsi, qui adversus se sententiara dixit, 
 insultat ! Vicit enim qui quod contendit obtinuit .... Eex es ? et 
 tam times quam timeris, et quamlibet sis raulto comitatu stipatus, ad 
 periculura tamen solus es. Dives es ? sed fortunge male creditur, et 
 magno viatico breve vit<B iter non instruitur, sed oneratur .... 
 Nos igitur qui moribus et pudore censenuir, merito malis voluptatibus 
 et pompis vestris et spectaculis abstineraus, quorum et de sacris 
 oriffinem novimus et noxia blandimenta damnamus." 
 
 Supplementary Note. 
 
 ON THE FOREBODINGS AMONG THE CHRISTIANS OF THE SECOND AND 
 THIRD CENTURIES RESPECTING THE APPROACHING END OF THE 
 WORLD AND A RENEWAL OF MANKIND AND HUMAN SOCIETY. 
 
 The highly interesting work of Comraodianus, which has recently 
 come to light in the " Spicilegium Solesraense," from the hidden 
 treasures of Sir Thomas Phillips at Middle-Hill *, furnishes a most 
 
 * This manuscript is quite distinct from the Codex Meermanianus in the 
 same library, -which contains the " Instructiones " of Commodianus, and the 
 existence of which was known to Oehler, their last editor. 
 
NOTES TO THE APOLOGY. 349 
 
 striking example of what I have said in the above-mentioned passage 
 about the connection of the apocalyptic views respecting the end of 
 the world with great and appalling events of the age, reflected in the 
 light of Ciiristian faith and hope. 
 
 It is easy to prove that this poem must have been written between 
 250, the Decian persecution, and 253, the victory of -/iEmilianus over 
 the Goths ; and that Commodianus, the author of the " Iiistructiones," 
 an African writer of the latter half of tlie third century, certainly 
 composed it. According to Father Pitra the manuscript does not 
 give the name. But this is a mistake. Sir Thomas Phillips says that 
 it is still legible.* Its style corresponds exactly with what Gennadius 
 
 * The title of the Poem is lost in the manuscript ; at the end however we 
 find the words "Explicit tractatus Sancti Episcopl" given by the Editor. 
 Tlisn follow two lilies, the first illegible (the name of the diocese), the second 
 shiiwing the letters com.od. . . . The " Instructiones " contain nothing 
 Avliich leads us to believe that Commodianus was a bishop when he wrote 
 them : nor can I find any allusion to it in the remarkable exordium of the 
 new text, which evidently is the remodeling of the first nine verses of the 
 " Instructiones," and a great improvement on that rude Prefatio : 
 
 " Quis poterit unum proprie Deum nosse ccelorum, 
 Nisi ipse ^ quern is tuleret ab errore nefando ? 
 Errabam ignarus, spatians, spe captus inani, 
 Duni furor fetalis primfc me portabat in auras. 
 Plus cram quam palea levior ; quasi centum adessent 
 In humeris capita, sic praeceps quocnmque ferebar. 
 Non satis ; his rebus criminose denique mersus 
 Veneficus fui factus ^, herbas incantando malignas. 
 Sed gratias Deo (nee sufficit vox mea tantum 
 lieddere), qui misere vacillanti tandem adluxit ! 
 Aggressusque fui tradita quas "' in codice legis, 
 Quid ibi rescirem. Staliiu mihi lainpada fulsit; 
 Tunc vere congovi Deum suininum in altis, 
 Et idoo tales hortor ab errore reccdant. 
 Quis melior medicu?, nisi passus vuhieris auctor ? " 
 
 I would not say that these lines absolutely exclude the episcopal dignity, 
 but the following verses (beginning of ch. iv.) certainly seem to do it : 
 
 ' Addidi ipse, metri causa. P. tulm-it procul. 
 ^ Cod. : Pene fui factus. 
 
 •' Cod. : traditor, quod P. vult significaro doctorem, euni (pu tradit 
 doctrinam. 
 
350 NOTES TO THE APOLOGY. 
 
 (about the year 500) says of this original and deep African writer of 
 provincial Latin : " Scripsit mediocri sermone, quasi versu, librum 
 adversus paganos," and it is probably a remodeling of the first book 
 of the " Instructiones." In this work, then, Commodianus gives a 
 general outline of his views as to the destruction of pagan Rome. 
 Nero is to conquer it, coming from the great river Euphrates, accord- 
 ing to the popular belief of the time, known to us by the sibylline 
 verses of the latter part of the first century. The beginning of woe 
 he proclaims to be the seventh persecution (the sixth was that of 
 Maximinus, in 239 ; the eighth that of Valerian, in 259 ; the tenth 
 that of Aurelian, in 279) ; and he then prophesies that gentile Rome 
 is to be attacked and conquered first hy the Goths, who are to burst 
 forth from beyond the "river." The infernal king Apolion (the 
 Apollyon, Hebrew Abaddon, of the Apocalypse, ix. 11.) will be with 
 them, and they will conquer Rome. This evidently is a peculiar turn 
 he gives to the popular belief, and it may or may not be his own ver- 
 sion. But the most intei'esting feature in his poem, which decidedly 
 bears the stamp of originality, is his idea that the Germanic tribes 
 are to be the friends and protectors of the Christians, whom they will 
 
 " Quid Deus in primis vel quiiliter singula fecit 
 Jam Moses edocuit : nos autein de Christo docemus. 
 Non sum ego vates, nee doctor jussus ut essem, 
 Sed pando prsedicta vatum oberrantibus austris." 
 
 All this, of course, does not exclude that the writer became a bishop after- 
 wards, as the subscription of the MS. asserts. 
 
 At all events, I have no hesitation to assert that our work is the improve- 
 ment of the first, which is that alluded to by Gennadius. The whole is en- 
 tirely remodeled, and with undoubted success as to poetical value. Nor is it 
 fettered by the unreasonable rule of continued acrostics. There are verses 
 in it which prove that the author had studied Lucretius : others are Dan- 
 tesque as to thought and style, in spite of all rhythmical barbarism. I have 
 already observed that the beginning of both is the same : our manuscript 
 concluded, as even D. Pitra's text shows (I have before me a much more 
 complete deciphering of the last thirty-three verses by Sir Thomas), with 
 the picture of the resurrection and the last judgment, which corresponds with 
 what is called the first book of the " Instructiones," and with the first three 
 chapters of the so-called second book. What follows (iv. — xxxviii.) is a 
 moral exhortation to all classes of Christians. If there was a division in two 
 books, these last twenty-five chapters constitute the second. One verse is li- 
 terally the same in the two recensions, that about the Jews (Instr. xxxviii. 
 V. 582. compared with the new text v. 228.), as the learned editor has well 
 observed. 
 
NOTES TO THE APOLOGY. 351 
 
 treat as brothers, while they show no mercy to idolatrous Rome and 
 her pagan senate. Here at all events we have the man, not the theo- 
 logian ; the philosophical observer of his age, not the systematical 
 interpreter of the Apocalypse, or of popular tradition among the 
 Christians of old. The Goths were on the horizon of the Roman em- 
 pire since their appearance in Thracia in 237. When Commodianus 
 wrote Decius had probably only just fallen fighting against them in 
 Moesia, A. d. 251. It was politically a right feeling of the times, that 
 Commodianus believed them to be in the ascendant; it was his 
 Christian faith which made him discover in them the nation of the 
 future. For his faith told him that moral decrepitude is an incurable 
 evil in a nation ; that as a demoralized people cannot do God's work 
 on earth, he finds fresh tribes to do it. The pagan writers of the 
 time see in the Goths only the scourge of the world ; enemies, which, 
 like all others, are finally to be subjugated by the power of Rome, for 
 the Roman empire is eternal, according to their national pride and 
 state religion. Commodianus believed in a blessed future state of the 
 world for regenerated mankind ; he believed also that this period was 
 to be preceded by dreadful struggles and pangs. He saw bloody per- 
 secutions (one of which was approaching or only just past), and in the 
 midst of these wars and attempts to exterminate Christianity, Com- 
 modianus beheld one of the Germanic tribes, of a nation possessing, 
 as Tacitus had remarked almost 150 years before him, a germ of ori- 
 ginal life, based upon inner truth and mutual trust. Now in the Goths 
 the African philosopher saw the life of the future, not simply the 
 scourge of humanity. This was neither a politicial conjecture nor one 
 based upon their being converts to Christianity, of which we find no 
 trace among them in the time of Commodianus, nor down to the be- 
 ginning of the fourth century. Unless we suppose this to have been 
 an accidental good hit, we must allow that Commodianus had an intui- 
 tive perception of what can or cannot produce new life to the deve- 
 lopment of the kingdom of God. This is not attributing to him a 
 miraculous prophetical gift ; there is no reason why any true 
 Christian philosopher should not discover in the conflicting elements 
 of disturbed and convulsed times what is to last and what is to perish. 
 Commodianus believed that the Roman and Greek nations were 
 doomed to perish, because they were deeply demoralized; and that 
 the age predicted by Christ, and beheld in vision by one of his disciples, 
 was to come after all those struggles, and be brought on by a barba- 
 rous but honest race. 
 
 Apollyon is the king of perdition of the Apocalypse ; he is not 
 
352 NOTES TO THE APOLOGY. 
 
 called the king of tlie Goths, but he accompanies them as the avenger 
 when tliey pass the Danube in arms. Now it is certainly a historical 
 fact that 150 years later a Gothic king conquered Rome, and that the 
 Goths became with other tribes the chosen instrument of world-re- 
 newing Christianity. And, moreover, the old world has perished 
 indeed ; the new one is come in reality, on this very globe, in this 
 very age of the world in which we live. 
 
 We now give the text of this interesting chapter with a few correc- 
 tions, which seem necessary and warranted. The versification is 
 barbarous, though not without rhythmical laws. The preceding chap- 
 ter predicts the kingdom of God in the year of the world 6000, 
 therefore, like Hippolytus, about 500 a. d. Mankind then will be 
 blessed in God : 
 
 " Tunc homo resurget soils in agone reductus, 
 Et gaudet in Deo, reminiscens quid fuit ante . . . 
 Nee erit anxietas ulla, nisi gaudia semper ; 
 Quisque tribus credit et sentit unum adesse, 
 Hie erit perpetuus in seterna ssecla renatus." 
 
 These are the concluding words of chapter xxxvi.: what follows con- 
 stitutes chapter xxxvii. : 
 
 " Sed quidam, haec, aiunt, quando h03c ventura putamus ? 
 Accipite paucis, quibus actis ilia sequentur. 
 Malta quidem signa fient teterrimse pestis,* 
 Sed erit initium septima persecutio nostra. 
 Ecce januam f pulsat et jam cognoscitur ense,J 
 Qui cito trajiciet§, Gothis inrumpentibus, amnem. 
 Rex Apolion erit cum ipsis nomine dirus, 
 Qui persecutionem dissipet sanctorum in armis. 
 Pergit ad Romam cum multa millia gentis || 
 Decretoque Dei captivat ex parte subactos. 
 Multi senatorum tunc enim captavi deflebunt, 
 Et Deum coelorum blasphemant a barbaro victi. 
 
 * Cod. : fieri tantse termini pesti. Pitra corrigit: tantum fient. 
 ■f Janua pulsat. P. pulsatur. 
 
 I Et cogitur esse. P. (cum Diibnero ut apparet) : cogitatur adesse. 
 
 § Quae cito trajeci. Et. — Pitra hagc ita in addendis corrigenda propoiiit 
 (p. 542.) : " Nescio an cuiquam placuerit : En januam pulsat et cogitatur 
 adesse. Nemini vero non probabitur necessaria correctio : Qus cito traji- 
 ciet," etc. 
 
 II Gentes. Praepositio cum a Commodiano etiam alio loco cui^ accusative 
 casu construitur. 
 
NOTES TO THE APOLOGY. 353 
 
 Hi tamen gentiles pascunt Christianos ubique, 
 Quos magis ut fratres requirunt gaudio pleni. 
 Nam luxuriosos et idola vana * colentes 
 Persequuntur enim et senatuni sub jugo mittunt. 
 Haec mala percipiunt qui sunt persecuti dilectos, 
 IMeusibus in quinque trucidantur isti "f" sub hoste. 
 Exsurgit interea sub ipso tempore Cyrus, 
 Qui terreat hostes et liberat inde senatum. 
 Ex infero redit, qui fuerat regno prajreptus J 
 Et diu servatus cum pristine corpore notus. 
 Discimus§ hunc auteuiNeronem esse vetustuni, 
 Qui Petrum et Paulum prius punivit in urbe : 
 Ipse redit iterum sub ipso sseculi fine 
 Ex locis apocrjphis, qui fuit reservatus in ista. 
 Hunc ipsis notum j| invisum esse niirantur, 
 Qui cum apparueril, quasi deum esse putabunt. 
 
 * Varia. f Ista. } Prseceptus. 
 
 § Dicimus. || Ipse natus. 
 
 VOL. II. A A 
 
APPENDIX. 
 
 ESSAYS 
 
 THE CHKISTIAN SACRIFICE AND WOESHIP 
 
 THE CONSTITUTION OF THE ANCIEI^T CHURCH. 
 
 VOL. II. * A A 2 
 
INTRODUCTORY ESSAY. 
 
 GENERAL VIEW OP THE CONSCIOUSNESS AND LIFE OF flTHE ANCIENT 
 CHURCH RESPECTING THE SACRIFICE AND TI3LB ECCLESIASTICAl, 
 LAW AND GOVERNMENT. . 
 
 The consciousness of the ancient Church rested upon the faith 
 in the Father, the only God, Creator, and Ruler of the Uni- 
 verse ; in the Son, the Eternal Word manifested and incarnate 
 in Christ; and in the Spirit, uniting and directing the faithful 
 into all truth. The ancient Christians, believing in the evi- 
 dence of those who had seen the incarnate Word, and were sent 
 by him into the world, felt themselves, as members of the body 
 of the faithful, to be a spiritual community, consecrated in truth 
 to the Father through the Son. But as soon as Jerusalem and 
 the Temple were destroyed, this belief and this inward feeling 
 prompted the Christians to consider themselves as those to whom 
 the future of the world was given, and to act accordingly. The 
 second destruction of Jerusalem and of Judaism by Hadrian 
 strengthened this feeling of their having a mission to perform 
 on this earth, and confirmed in them that world-renewing tend- 
 ency. But their position was unprecedented. They were to 
 form a religious body, and they had no Law ; for the Law of 
 the Mosaic dispensation had been fulfilled, and was now extinct. 
 The decalogue itself remained only as a moral code, and that 
 in the sense of the sublime spiritual summary given in Deu- 
 teronomy, and sanctioned by Christ : Love to God and to the 
 brother Man. They were to realize the divine Temple-worship, 
 and they had no visible God and no ritual : for their God was 
 within them, and they were themselves Sanctuary, Priests, and 
 Sacrifice. They were to reorganize the world by the principle 
 and example of self-government, but they had themselves no 
 form of government; for they were to manifest self-government 
 based upon self-control within and extinction of the selfish will. 
 
 A A 3 
 
358 GENERAL VIEW OF THE CONSCIOUSNESS 
 
 These three negations made their cause appear to unbelievers, 
 Jews and Gentiles, desperate and contemptible, and themselves 
 godless men and atheists : but, in the mind of God, these 
 negations, no less than those corresponding affirmations, were 
 the pledge of their vitality and of the truth of their cause. 
 The future of the world was by both given to them who had in 
 themselves eternal life. The history of the world bears evi- 
 dence that their faith was true, and that they fulfilled the 
 divine decree. 
 
 The ancient Christians had no Law binding upon them ex- 
 cept that of conscience. But they believed that God had 
 revealed himself to Abraham, and afterwards through Moses and 
 the Prophets, to the Jewish people, and that the Jewish Scrip- 
 tures spoke of Christ. Christ in the Scriptures, that is to say, 
 in the Old Testament, was to them what God in nature is to the 
 mind contemplating the universe. But the Spirit, which was 
 working in them, gave them in the course of the first century, 
 or in the first two generations after Christ, the Scriptures of the 
 New Covenant. During this epoch the consciousness of the 
 faithful was principally directed to Christ, as to Him who was 
 to come again, in order to make an end of the wickedness and 
 godlessness of the world. 
 
 But since the destruction of Jerusalem, the downfall of the 
 Temple of the Almighty, and the extinction of the Sacrifice and 
 Worship of the Sanctuary, the Christians gradually understood 
 that they were to continue Christ's work of love, self-devotion, 
 and regenerating wisdom and holiness upon the earth as it is, 
 and in the world as it was then constituted. From this time 
 the Spirit within them directed their consciousness more and 
 more towards the work now to be done, a work respecting which 
 the Apostolic writings, most providentially, contained no precept. 
 It was by the agency of that same Spirit, which had made 
 Histories the sacred records of the New Covenant between God 
 and man, that the Church, that is to say, redeemed humanity, 
 became conscious of her position as to the two fundamental 
 branches of her life. 
 
 The one is that which directs itself immediately to God, the 
 intercommunion of worshipping believers with God in Spirit and 
 
AND LIFE OF THE ANCIENT CHUKCU. 359 
 
 Truth. This is the manifestation of divine life, as thankfulness 
 and love, through prayer. Prayer is both the consecration of 
 Self to God, and the appropriation of divine life, and this act is 
 by its own nature one that has its root in the universal con- 
 sciousness implanted in man. For it is performed by the be- 
 liever, not as an individual act, but in his capacity of a member 
 of the believing community, of believing humanity. In this 
 element of religious life originated Christian worship, the germs 
 of which, though only spiritually, were planted by Christ ; first, 
 by the Lord's prayer and His speeches recorded in St. John's 
 Gospel ; subsequently, by his dying command to remember and 
 announce his death at every common meal. But all these ele- 
 ments crystallized and coalesced in Christian worship only by 
 the free impulse of the Spirit in the Church. 
 
 The other branch of the life of the Church is directed towards 
 God through the world. This is the sacrifice of Self in the 
 ordinary life of man, that is to say, in the relations of the 
 Christian to his brethren and to the world without. Upon 
 this point again, no law was prescribed to the Christians. But 
 the command to love their brethren as themselves, to consider 
 every man as their neighbour, and to live in the world as children 
 of one Father, made men the temple of God. These were 
 the germs which, in the midst of the bloodiest military despotism, 
 and the deepest prostration of national life, became through 
 the Spirit the origin of all liberty, self-government, and order, 
 which now exist in the world and, humanly speaking, regulate 
 its destinies. 
 
 The fundamental idea of the formation of Christian discipline 
 and government is, the existence of a Christian people, a com- 
 munity capable of boundless expansion, but which is represented 
 by two or three gathered together in Christ's name in every 
 local congregation. In this community, and therefore at a later 
 stage of its evolution in their synodic representation, resides the 
 Spirit, and it possesses therefore the right of ultimate decision 
 in all matters connected with the common Christian order. 
 
 The object of such ordinances, however, was to regulate the 
 life and conduct of individual believers, not by externally binding 
 laws, but by the power of conscience. In this manner customs 
 
 A A 4 
 
360 GENERAL VIEW OF THE CONSCIOUSNESS 
 
 were formed on the basis of Christ's precepts, and the occasiona 
 advice and decisions of the Apostles, which still were directly 
 enjoined, according as the exigency of the moment required, 
 through the Spirit in the Church, i. e. the Believers. 
 
 The community celebrated common meals, or love feasts, as a 
 bond of mutual brotherhood between rich and poor, great and 
 small ; on which occasions they made thankful remembrance of 
 the death of Christ, and prayed for the coming of his kingdom 
 in conformity with his dying injunctions. 
 
 In imitation of the Jewish institution, the bread and wine were 
 administered by the Elders, who had originally been appointed 
 by the Apostles, or their missionaries. According to credible 
 evidence, this office was subsequently declared by the Apostles, 
 with common consent, an office for life, unless an Elder should 
 become, in the judgment of the congregation, incapable or un- 
 worthy of performing it. These, then, were the Elders who in 
 the common meals administered bread and wine and prayer, and 
 took care of the poor, supported by the Ministrants or Deacons, 
 They also presided in all the common Christian acts of the 
 faithful, whether in preaching or in administering the substance 
 of the Church, and decided ordinary cases of dispute, the ulti- 
 mate jurisdiction being vested in the whole congregation, the 
 Elders of course included. St. John established, or sanctioned 
 the institution of single Rectors, called Overseers, which is the 
 meaning of the word Bishops, as presidents of the presbytery. 
 This form of government, as being the more perfect and prac- 
 tical, particularly in such difficult times, soon spread over the 
 Christian world. 
 
 From these beginnings sprang that state of worship, discipline, 
 and government, ,which, with great varieties, but in wonderful 
 harmony, ruled the Christian world in the fifth, sixth, and 
 seventh generations, or in the ages of Irenaeus of Lugdunum, 
 Clemens of Alexandria, Hippolytus, and Origen. 
 
 The Canon of the New Testament was settled in the 
 leading Churches, with some slight difierences which disturbed 
 nobody. 
 
 As to the common Christian worsliip, the synagogue had 
 been its prototype in the fir.st ages : afterwards the service of 
 
AND LIFE OF THE ANCIENT CHURCH. 361 
 
 the Temple had been realized in spirit and truth by the Chris- 
 tian congregation becoming conscious of being the true Temple, 
 and their heart the true Sanctuary, hallowed by the death and 
 remembrance of Christ. The sacrifice of thanksgiving was in- 
 variably connected with the celebration of the Communion, no 
 meeting for worship taking place without the faithful partaking 
 of it. Thus the celebration of the thankful self-sacrifice of the 
 Church was based upon the atoning sacrifice of Christ, and 
 sealed by its solemn remembrance. 
 
 Some few formularies had come into general use on these 
 occasions. The Lord's Prayer, with the Doxology added to it 
 liturgically by the Christian Church, was the first. Next came 
 the hymn of antiphonic praise and prayer, called the Morning 
 Hymn, which had its origin in a still more ancient one, of which 
 the words were borrowed from St. Luke's Gospel, the utterance 
 of the exulting sympathy of the invisible world with the birth 
 of Christ. That hymn (preserved in its more ancient form in 
 the Alexandrian MS. of the New Testament, to the canonical 
 books of which it is appended) afterwards became the origin of 
 the Litany, which is nothing but an amplification of its middle 
 part. Then the antiphonic exhortation, " Sursum corda," 
 ushered in the sacrificial service : but the prayer of the Eucharist 
 itself (literally, of the Thanksgiving) had sprung out of the 
 Jewish custom of prayer, by which the father of the family 
 blessed the bread and the cup of wine. Its wording was left to 
 the inspiration or learning of the officiating Elder, who might 
 content himself with praying the Lord's Prayer, followed by 
 the Doxology. There may have been some formularies written 
 down for the private use of the weak and ignorant ; but even 
 this is doubtful. The idea of reading prayers seems to have 
 been particularly repugnant to the ancient Church at this 
 solemn time. 
 
 Lastly, the life of the Church in the world was guided, on the 
 basis of the words of Christ and the injunctions of the Apostles, 
 by certain rules and practices, which had gradually been formed 
 in the different Churches. They were, on the whole, justly 
 considered Apostolical, particularly in the most ancient Churches. 
 Most likely they were here and there consigned to writing at 
 
362 GENERAL VIEW OF THE CONSCIOUSNESS 
 
 an early date, and either collected in the form of precepts or 
 rules, called in a later age Canons, or in the form of mere 
 homiletic addresses. But there was no authentic collection 
 either of Canons, or of Injunctions or Constitutions, much less 
 were there decrees and canons of Synods, or Councils, to that 
 effect. 
 
 The rules and customs respecting Baptism partook both of 
 the liturgical and the constitutional character. There were, 
 first, rules respecting the preliminary reception of a catechumen, 
 as a pupil to be admitted to instruction. Then (generally 
 after three years) came the solemn moment when the catechumen 
 was to profess, with certain forms, his faith before the con- 
 gregation, and pledge himself most solemnly, in the face of God, 
 to be faithful to his profession of Christianity, in word and life, 
 unto death : upon which declaration he was immersed in water 
 in the name of the Father (God), the Son (Jesus the Christ), 
 and the Spirit (the life-giver of the Church). 
 
 The idea of a collateral view of baptism and communion, as 
 the two sacraments, and of a doctrine of the sacraments on the 
 ground of that juxtaposition, was (as has been already intimated) 
 entirely unknown to the ancient Church. 
 
 It is impossible not to see in this whole development the 
 special manifestation of the Divine Spirit, directed towards 
 making the organization and life of the Christian association the 
 regenerating element of human society in ages to come. For, 
 according to the course of development which we observe in 
 other religious societies, our sacred books would now be, not the 
 Histories of Christ and his disciples, but a Liturgy as Ritual, 
 and a Canonical Digest as Law, as a Constitution. Moham- 
 medanism has made both out of the Koran, which itself is 
 already strongly impregnated with ritual and constitutional 
 tendencies and elements. Even the Jewish development shows 
 something essentially analogous, if we consider how, out of 
 Abrahamitic rites, and the ethical laws, which w^e call the Ten 
 Commandments, a new religious code was formed, which made 
 the nation first rebellious and then formalistic. 
 
 A century after Hippolytus Christianity began to become the 
 religion of the empire, a process which was completed in another 
 
AND LIFE OF THE ANCIENT CHURCH. 363 
 
 century. About that time, towards the middle of the fifth 
 century, the Ritual was completely formularized as far as the 
 communion service was concerned, partly out of really old and 
 venerable materials, partly out of spurious and hybrid liturgical 
 compositions bearing the names of Apostles. But collections • 
 of traditional Apostolic, or at least very ancient, customs and 
 ordinances had been made first, before the time of Irenasus and 
 Hippolytus, at all events about the middle of the second century, 
 under the fictitious names of " Doctrine," or " Constitution," 
 of the Apostles. The disciples of Christ were supposed to have 
 dictated them to their disciple, Clemens of Rome, who at an 
 early stage became the mythical defender of the episcopal 
 principle and hierarchical order, and at the same time the 
 representative of the more Judaic or Petrine view of Christian 
 doctrine and life. About 150 years later, Hippolytus, by his 
 treatise on " The Apostolic Traditions respecting the Charismata, 
 or Gifts of the Spirit," (a sort of philosophy of the primitive 
 traditional ceremonial Customs and Regulations), exercised, as 
 we shall show, an influence upon the composition of a part of 
 the Apostolic Constitutions, namely, the section upon " The 
 Offices of the Church, and some of the rites connected with the 
 performance of them in the Christian worship." 
 
 The following Fragments are destined to illustrate, and, as far 
 as is necessary, to establish by new researches, such points 
 respecting the view here taken of the history of the ancient 
 Church, as appear either not to have been already sufficiently 
 cleared up in general, or which receive a new light by the 
 restoration of Hippolytus as an influential man in the second 
 and third centuries, and the organ of communication between 
 the East and the West. 
 
 The immortal woi-k of Neander, " The History of the 
 Church," and his special books on the Apostolic Age, on the 
 Gnostics, and on TertuUian, may be considered as the general 
 critical basis upon which our inquiry takes its stand : but there 
 
364 GENERAL VIEW OF THE CONSCIOUSNESS, ETC. 
 
 is scarcely a single point which is not illustrated by other 
 researches of the historical German school. Gieseler's and 
 Niedner's truly learned " Handbooks of Ecclesiastical History " 
 deserve here a special mention. 
 
 Since the years 1822 and 1829, when I wrote my *' Essays 
 on the Liturgical Life of the Church," Hofling has published 
 some instructive and accurate monographies on the history and 
 philosophy of the Christian Sacrifice, according to Justin 
 Martyr, Lrenaeus, Tertullian, and Clemens of Alexandria, which 
 fully confirm what I said in my theses on that subject. I 
 limited myself to a short documentary exposition of the views 
 of Irenaeus on the Christian Sacrifice and the Eucharist. 
 
 The weakest point of German criticism is the origin and 
 gradual formation of the Apostolical Constitutions and Canons. 
 Krabbe's and Drey's researches (1829 and 1832) have certainly 
 refuted many of the uncritical and unhistorical ideas of Beveridge 
 on this subject (corrected also, as to the Canon Law, by Eich- 
 horn, in his Handbook*): but the positive solution of the 
 problem is little advanced by those writers. The publication 
 of the Coptic text of the " Apostolical Constitutions," by 
 Tattam (1849), combined with the researches on Hippolytus in 
 the first volume of this work, may, I hope, furnish the key to 
 such a solution. I have collated the Coptic text with Ludolf's 
 translations of a part of the corresponding Ethiopic version. 
 The Arabic version of another Alexandrian collection, pre- 
 served in the Ethiopic Church, and known by the name of the 
 Canons of Hippolytus, is of no less importance. Of this 
 collection nothing has hitherto been known beyond the titles of 
 the chapters. The text I owe principally to the kindness of 
 my learned friend, the Rev. W. Cureton, to whom I am also 
 indebted for that of the Apostolical Constitutions according to 
 the Church of Antioch, preserved in Syriac, and contained 
 among the treasures rescued from the Libyan desert, but not 
 yet published. 
 
 * Grundsiitze des Kirchenrechts, 1831, vol. i. 
 
365 
 
 FIRST SECTION. 
 
 ESSAYS ON THE CHRISTIAN SACRIFICE AND WORSHIP. 
 
 I. 
 
 ■ THESES ON THE EUCHARIST WPHCH CAN BE PKOVED HISTORICALLT. 
 
 (Translated from the German original, written in Dec. 1822.) 
 
 It is on the authority of the words of Christ as recorded by St. eTohn, 
 and the doctrine of St. Paul, that the ancient Church, with a different 
 arrangement of the separate parts, has viewed the Communion under 
 very different forms and terms, and as the highest act of the Christian 
 Church, on the faithful performance of which a peculiar blessing is 
 believed to rest. In the other parts of the service the faithful glorify 
 Christ, and pray and thank God through him as the Mediator : but 
 in the Communion they worship God with Christ, as Christ's 
 brethren, and as being one with him, just as Christ ivorshipped his 
 Father. This view explains, for instance, the difficult 23rd canon of 
 the Third Carthaginian Council : *' Ut nemo in precibus patrem pro 
 filio, vel filium pro patre, nominet. Et quum altari adsistitur, semper 
 ad patrem dirigatur oratio." Cf. Bingh. v. p. 66 sqq. ; Basnage, 
 Annal. ad an. 397, iii. p. 159. 
 
 2. 
 The different parts necessarilj' combined in this celebration, are : 
 
 1) The facts of the redemption, and especially that of the pi'o- 
 pitiatoi-y death of Christ, being the fulfilment of the Law, the true sense 
 of the Jewish rites, the essential truth in the shadows of the heathen 
 sacrifices. 
 
 2) The idea that by the internal working of the wills of the whole 
 body of believers, the power of the propitiatory death of Christ is 
 individually renewed to the end of the world. 
 
 3) The union between the historical fact, which is of universal 
 efficacy and was accomplished once for all, and the spiritual and in- 
 dividual FACT, which in the succession of generations, nations, and 
 times forms the spiritual body of Christ : a union which rests on the 
 foundation of the faith in a Church, and her duration until the second 
 
366 THESES ON THE EUCHARIST 
 
 coming of Christ; and which the Church having perceived by the re- 
 flecting power of the mind feels the want of expressing liturgically. 
 
 3. 
 
 Every dogmatical exposition of this idea, and of the connection be- 
 tween its different parts, is one-sided, and is reduced to a secondary 
 value so soon as the realization of the inward life in the act of 
 worship operates vigorously upon the mind. 
 
 4. 
 The controversies between the two Protestant Churches (the 
 Lutheran and Calvinistic) not only did not touch this highest view, 
 but started from an equal acknowledgment of its truth. 
 
 5. 
 The real point at issue with the Roman Church does not consist in 
 the doctrine of Transubstantiation, which forms a part of that dog- 
 matic development of the past, which is to be reduced to its proper, 
 that is to say, a secondary, value. 
 
 6. 
 The real fundamental corruption of the Roman Church, and at the 
 same time her whole power, rather in the heathenish turn she has 
 given to the liturgically expressed consciousness of the ancient 
 Church about her sacrifice, and the consequent change of centre of 
 the sacrificial action in the celebration of the Communion. 
 
 7. 
 The fundamental parts of all the old Masses are Eucharistia and 
 Communio. The divisions of the first are : 
 
 Laudes, General praise for God's benefits, in relation to redemp- 
 tion and sanctification. 
 
 Preces, General prayer, of the faithful, intercession or supplication 
 for all mankind. 
 
 Commemoratio, Declaration of the death of Christ, and of his com- 
 mandment always to commemorate the same. 
 
 8. 
 The divisions of the Communio are : 
 
 Consecratio, Prayer for blessing the visible tokens (elementa), for 
 blessing those who receive them, and all who are in the com- 
 munion of the Church, together with their relations, dead as 
 well as living (in this respect nearly coinciding with the 
 Preces). 
 Communio, The partaking of the Supper />// all the faithful. 
 
WHICH CAN BE PROVED HISTORICALLY. 367 
 
 Oblatio, The spiritual offering of the faithful, of their wishes and 
 hopes, and their whole Being ; a part easily confounded with 
 the offering of the dona, munera, elementa, in the offertory 
 BEFORE the Communio. 
 
 If we would express the view of the old Church, as it can even 
 now be liturgically traced, exactly as the Roman Church would be 
 obliged to express it, if (Avhich is a question of discipline) she would 
 retain the existing celebration of Mass, divesting it of all that is false, 
 we might do so somewhat in the following manner : 
 
 Mankind in abstracto or poientialiter, is reconciled with God 
 through the historical fact of Christ's propitiatory death, which was 
 only foreshadowed, not realized, by all the former saci'ifices and 
 expiations. But the operation of the Holy Ghost is necessary to 
 make the individual, actualiter, participate in this reconciliation. 
 This operation shows itself most perfectly and in a particularly 
 blessed manner, which cannot be compensated for by anything else, in 
 the act by which all who partake of the Lord's Supper are incor- 
 porated with Christ by the Communion, according to the Command- 
 ments of Christ. All those who worthily receive this Communion 
 are most intimately united with Christ, and through him with God 
 and with all good spirits ; and for them this act of the Communion is 
 as decisive an act in the kingdom of God on earth (that is to say, in 
 the Church), as the act of regeneration in baptism (that is to say, of 
 the primitive baptism, or such a baptism of children as is completed by 
 confirmation) is for the faithful individual. So far as any one of those 
 who partake of the Supper becomes a living part of Christ's body, he 
 enters into the union. For those who are united through Christ's 
 body and blood are divested of their Self, by which, although they 
 are regenerated, they were separated from God and the faithful 
 people. They receive, therefore, in the highest degree, the divine 
 power to offer to God the spiritual sacrifice of themselves, resigning 
 their own will to that of God, in order to be delivered from all their 
 sins, and to advance the kingdom of God. This offering and spiritual 
 sacrifice is just as agreeable to God, with regard to the partakers of 
 the Supper, as Christ's death and visible offering of himself were 
 agreeable to him with regard to all mankind ; whereas, without this 
 union and incorporation into Christ, such a work would have been 
 not only useless, but also rash and condemnatory. But as all the 
 faithful in Christ are intimately united by the celebration of the 
 
368 THESES ON THE EUCHARIST 
 
 Supper, each partial union of them must be an appropriation, and 
 consequently a spiritual reproduction, of the propitiatory death, a 
 general efficacious and valid act in the spiritual world, a general 
 advancement of the kingdom of God. In this action, therefore, con- 
 sists the true union of all the faithful, whether living or dead, 
 whether members of the Church militant or triumphant. 
 
 The view of the Reformers in not giving prominence to this idea in 
 the celebration of the Supper, was correct as a point of discipline ; for 
 the Papistical abuses were so closely bound up with it as to be inse- 
 parable, the idea of sacrifice itself having such an indelible power 
 over the mind. There is an analogy in the Mosaic legislation with 
 regard to the doctrine of immortality, the belief in which was united 
 with the worship of the dead amongst the heathen and inseparable 
 from polytheism. 
 
 10. 
 
 The faith in a Church rests on a union of religious feelings and ex- 
 perience with one or more historical elements which form the objec- 
 tive foundation. For through this union alone the historical part can 
 be understood as a revelatiofi ; that is, not as a passing apparition, hut 
 as an immediate operation of divine intelligence, and as a permanently 
 operating, living, divine power, and therefore as the totality of the 
 different elements of the individual life. It is an undoubted fact, 
 although it may be difficult of explanation, that such a belief may 
 rest for centuries on a basis historically false. In like manner, vice 
 versa, a Church, in which a true historical foundation has been pre- 
 served, may decay and die, and must do so necessarily, without any 
 violent catastrophe, so soon as that connection is denied iti principle, 
 that is to say, so soon as all living religion is rejected, or has become 
 unintelligible. But in historical times a Church is lost irretrievably, 
 as soon as an inward religious life awakes, and such a connection has 
 become impossible for the really prominent religious minds of the 
 time, for intelligent and conscientious men. Such a Church, never- 
 theless, may support herself, for some time, through the good and evil 
 disposition of human nature, through respect and inertness, until 
 another ground of faith be shown to the inward religious experience. 
 This other ground must exhibit itself as the true one, by proving 
 itself to be not something lower and negative, but something higher 
 and positive, and by establishing itself as fact, by the proof of the 
 inward power. That this is possible in the development of the 
 Christian Church, is evinced above all by the divine power of the 
 Gospel : the faith, that it ivill happen, is the real faith in the Church. 
 
369 
 
 II. 
 
 THE EPOCHS OF THE HISTORY OF THE CHRISTIAN SACRIFICE AND 
 THE EUCHARIST. 
 
 (Translated from the German original, written in Feb. 1 823.) 
 
 No one of the four ecclesiastical doctrines is immediately connected 
 with the words of Christ or Apostolic usage. 
 
 * 
 
 No one of them exhausts, as a doctrine, either the words of Christ 
 
 or the practice of the Apostles. 
 
 * 
 
 In Christ's words is found what was destined to render the celebra- 
 tion of the Supper the groundwork of Christian communion and divine 
 service, and what distinguished its development from that of all the 
 other bonds of communion and parts of worship — from baptism and 
 
 prayer. 
 
 # 
 
 In Christ's words is found the connection between the fact of his 
 propitiatory death with bread and wine, and the partaking of them, as 
 a new covenant, as a commemoration, and (in reference to what is 
 said by St John) as the highest divine blessing for life eternal. 
 
 * 
 The connection thus founded cannot be exhausted either by moral 
 application or by dogmatical argumentation. 
 
 * 
 
 The institution of the Communion received its perfect meaning and 
 fulfilment through Christ's death, and the pouring out of the Holy 
 
 Ghost upon the Disciples. 
 
 * 
 
 From that time the meaning of the celebration was necessarily 
 understood by the mind in the same degree as the Christian worship 
 separated itself from the Judaic, and in the same manner as the 
 Christian community became conscious of its peculiar position. 
 
 * 
 
 VOL. II. B B 
 
370 EPOCHS OF THE HISTORY OF THE 
 
 Undoubtedly tlxe Supper was in the beginning considered as a 
 part of Christ's Listitution, and for this reason the preparatory act 
 of bringing bread and wine, and even other food, to the table, was 
 viewed as a sacred act, being an imitation of Christ's thanksgiving and 
 blessing {ev-)(^api(TTf]crae, evXoyrjtTag). It is evident from 1 Cor. xii., 
 that, when St. Paul wrote that Epistle, the Eucharist was celebrated 
 (tfter the meal. Did this celebration take place at the morning meet- 
 ing ? and, if so, did it take place before a meal or altogether without 
 a meal ? It is possible that the Apostles changed the original union 
 of meal and Communion, on account of the disorder to which it had 
 given rise. 
 
 * 
 
 Between this and the next tradition the separation of Christian and 
 Jewish worship took place. Together with or before it, the idea of 
 Christ being the High Priest, and his death being the fulfilment of 
 the Jewish expiatory sacrifice, had perfectly developed itself into a 
 spiritualization of the notions of altar and sanctuary. The Epistle to 
 the Hebrews (xiii. 10.), addressed perhaps to Alexandria, evinces al- 
 ready an almost dogmatical consciousness of this idea. 
 
 * 
 
 Pliny's account exhibits to us the Communion as separate from the 
 Agape, or at least as being celebrated before it (with an interval) : 
 " Morem fuisse rursus coeundi ad capiendum cibum, promiscuum ta- 
 men et innoxium." 
 
 * 
 
 In Justin Martyr, the offering of the bread and wine that were 
 to be blessed, and the offering of alms that were to be distributed 
 among the indigent {^wpa, aKpoQlvia, Const. App.), are expressed by 
 the same word {trpoaipiptiv^. It is said of the latter, TrpotrfepErai rw 
 TrpoefTTWTi Ti^y aCeX(l)iuv (i. 85.), for prayer and thanksgiving (ev'x"- 
 piffTia), But by the same word bread and wine are denoted (k-ai »; rpo^j) 
 aiiTi] KaXe'irai irap iiixlv tv^apiaTia). In this expression three dif- 
 ferent series of ideas are involved which may be multifariously deve- 
 loped. Ou yap WQ KOivbv apTOv ovZk kolvov irofxa ravra Xai^ijoavofxeV 
 aW ov rpoTvov Zih Xoyov Qeov aapK07roir]Qf\c 'lr](Tove Hpiarog 6 aiorrjp 
 yjuwv Kai aapKa Kcii a'l^a VTvep (TMTrjplag j/^wj' ea'^ei', oiirwc Kai r))y Bi 
 eiJj^jjC Xoyov row Trap' avrov Ev^apicTTElaav Tpocpiji', e^ I'jg al/xa Kai 
 aapKEQ KCtra p.f.Ta(DoX)}v Tpefoi'Tui yf-itiiy, itceiyov rov crapKOTronjdEyros 
 'l7](Tov XpirTTov kai (TctpKu Kcu (It fid totStt^SjjjuE)' £/»'a(. Thc tlircc ideas 
 combined here may be expressed in the following propositions : 
 
CHRISTIAN SACRIFICE AND THE EUCHARIST. 371 
 
 Christ was invested with flesh and blood through the Word of God : 
 
 Bread and icine become Christ's body and blood through the word 
 of Christ : 
 
 The partakers of the Supper become spiritual members of Christ 
 through the Communion. 
 
 Justin does not speak expressly of the common meal, which may be 
 explained by the circumstance of his mentioning the oblatio of food 
 in opposition to the partaking of bread and wine (etti -rraai te oIq 
 TTpoaipepoi-ieda (what we feed upon) evXoyovfxei', k.t.X. ib. 87.). 
 
 Tertullian's ccena is the Love-feast (agape) at nightfall. He 
 speaks of the communion as Justin does ; and even in his time it was 
 the custom of the African Church to take it fasting, which proves 
 that the meal and Communion had been separated. Cyprian, how- 
 ever, did not condemn the most ancient custom, which in the African 
 Church itself was observed on Holy Thursday. The oblation of the 
 primiticB remained, however, as an introductory part. 
 
 * 
 
 The fact of none of the older Fathers of the Church recognizing the 
 custom of the Love-feast before the Communion, and of their general 
 admission of its celebration after the Communion to be the oldest 
 Apostolical custom, is a proof that the change took place at an early 
 period. Meals in the Church, without the Communion, were however 
 still celebrated in the fourth century, and in some places even down to 
 the seventh, as is proved by the prohibition in the Councils of Lao- 
 
 dicea and Tours. 
 
 * 
 
 There is an unquestionable harmony in the development of the 
 celebration and of the fundamental view of the Lord's Supper in the 
 several principal Churches, which becomes more evident, when the 
 individual difference is acknowledged and asserted. The existence of 
 tliis harmony obliges us to admit two facts. First : Special Aposto- 
 lical institutions and injunctions (as is also admitted by Schleier- 
 macher) — secondly : Perpetual operation of the Spirit in the Church. 
 The historical and spiritual factors act in this development in a man- 
 ner analogous to the relation of both in the formation of language. 
 
 * 
 
 In the Fathers of the third and fourth centuries we find the 
 Ev^apiaria already developed in the twofold signification contained in 
 the words of the Institution : real thanksgivings for God's benefits 
 and prayer for blessing {tvXoyui', ayiaS^eif is used instead of tvXoyaly 
 in the Greek Mass of the Const. App. in the words of the consecra- 
 tion, sanctificare). The two prayers together therefore form the whole 
 
 B B 2 
 
372 EPOCHS OF THE HISTORY OF THE 
 
 ■n-poffcpopu : both are developed from the consciousness of the Church 
 being the community of the faithful. The tuXoy/a begins with the 
 invocation of the Holy Ghost to bless the partakers of the Supper and 
 the token of their sacramental prayer, the so-called elementa, gene- 
 rally in a reversed order, the universal prayer for the Christian Church 
 coming after the prayer for blessing the partakers. But this most 
 solemn prayer is always based upon the promise and the prayer of 
 Christ in the Institution : the words of the Institution are therefore 
 always read at the beginning of the prayers of consecration. 
 
 In how different a manner this idea developed itself is especially 
 evident from the Petavian Codex or the Visigothic missal (now Bibl. 
 Christina, cod. 62G.) of the eighth or ninth century, which was edited 
 by Thomasius. In this missal, the reading of the words of Institu- 
 tion follows the collect after the Sanctus, with which all the Churches 
 concluded their prayer of thanksgiving. The precatory part of the 
 offertory, in all the other Latin Masses (which all are derived from 
 the Roman), stands in part between the " Sanctus " and " Qui pridie " 
 as tlie conclusion of the " sacrificium laudis," and in part afterwards 
 
 as " preces sanctificationis." 
 
 * 
 
 The Sacrifice, denoted by the oblatio, is called in all passages, not 
 only of the Fathers, but also of the Roman canon, sacrificium laudis. 
 
 * 
 
 But we find the prayer, the act of oblatio, and the sacrifice very 
 
 early identified, even before the oblatio of the congregation began to 
 
 be an antiquated custom. The connection of the ideas, by which the 
 
 token of thanks and of the prayers of the faithful was considered as 
 
 being to them the token of the body and blood of Christ, upon which 
 
 the certainty of their being heard was based, would naturally be more 
 
 or less prominent, 
 
 * 
 
 But in whatever way we may combine the three points, the histo- 
 rical element, or the fact of the revelation of Christ's death and his 
 Institution ; the signs of communion with him, as well as of the 
 prayer of the faithful ; and the inward act of regeneration and union 
 with God in the dividual ; we can never, from this point of view, 
 arrive at the doctrine established by the Council of Trent; that the 
 consecratio hostile was to be a repetition of the propitiatory death of 
 Christ, a sacrifice, and even the perpetual sacrifice of the Church. 
 
CHRISTIAN SACRIFICE AND THE EUCHARIST. 373 
 
 All the Fathers, when speaking of the mystical pai't of the Lord's 
 Supper, always do so with special reference to the communion, as the 
 fulfilment of the act, and their feeling rests in the consciousness of 
 the Church, that is to say, of the communion of the faithful, as beiag 
 the body of Christ, Christ's brethren, children of God through the 
 
 Holy Ghost. 
 
 * 
 
 If it be granted that this commimio exists in its fullest sense (that 
 is to say, in conformity with the expressions of the third article in the 
 creed), and that it was sealed originally and essentially by Clirist 
 himself consecrating his Supper, and instituting the Church in the 
 communion (as partaking of his body and blood), and that it is con- 
 tinually renewed in the succession of generations, it is necessary to 
 grant also ; first, that the whole development of the celebration of the 
 Lord's Supper 07i the basis of the consciousness of the Church was 
 purely evangelical, although not literally contained in the Gospel ; 
 and secondly, that this development was necessarily connected with 
 the historical evolution and modification of this consciousness, so that 
 both would degenerate and disappear together. 
 
 * 
 
 It does not at all follow from this, that even the most perfect form 
 of the ancient Church is capable of being maintained unchanged. 
 
 On the contrary, if we consider it well, this is impossible from its 
 very nature. For in every individual or common expression of the 
 consciousness of a given time, three things, the idea, the organ of 
 expression, and the external form (the crust, without which no life 
 is isolated from the external world), are intimately, and for this stage 
 of development inseparably, joined together, according to the eternal 
 laws of human existence. Whatever appears as crust during the 
 formation becomes dross after the decay ; lifeless but indestructible. 
 
 # 
 
 Viewed from the centre of that consciousness, the doctrine of Tran- 
 substantiation lies on quite a different field ; the very question even 
 cannot be started from that centre. 
 
 * 
 
 Neither can such an opposition to that doctrine, as tends towards a 
 
 doctrine connected in one way or another with the same question. 
 
 * 
 
 The rite of the communion cannot be expressed by any dogmatical 
 exposition on this subject, even were such an exposition offered simply 
 
 as an explanation of the consciousness of the mind of the worshipper. 
 
 * 
 
 B B 3 
 
374 EPOCHS OF THE HISTORY OF THE 
 
 The point from which Calvin starts in his "Institutions" is un- 
 doubtedly very convenient for understanding historically the develop- 
 ment of the celebration of the Communion, with a view to refute the 
 Roman doctrine, and to establish a pure exposition upon the basis of 
 the Gospel and Apostolic custom. But in order to arrive at a con- 
 clusion, and to oppose the systems of Rome, Luther, and Zwingli, he 
 afterwards abandons that idea and throAvs himself into the field of 
 controversy. 
 
 * 
 
 The depth of Luther's theology consisted in the consciousness of 
 the Christian life in God through the union with Christ, which 
 delivers us from the bonds of our individual existence (liberi arbitrii), 
 and removes us into the liberty of the Divine will. He rejected, 
 therefore, every doctrine of the communion that led him away from it, 
 or appeared to endanger this consciousness. This view manifests it- 
 self not so much in his dogmatical writings as in his sermons (chiefly 
 those of 1518), and a comparison of them with the deepest of all theo- 
 logical works, the " German Theology." It was, perhaps, the powerful 
 influence of St. Augustin, that prevented Luther from developing his 
 doctrine as it appears there ; for St. Augustin uses also other ex- 
 pressions with which the system of ideas, subsequently sanctioned by 
 the Church, might more easily be connected. 
 
 * 
 
 The associations of ideas, created by the earliest ecclesiastical cus- 
 tom, were very early treated mystically ; the token of the ecclesias- 
 tical thanksgiving being, at the same time, the image and token of the 
 great universal propitiatory sacrifice. But no original Christian 
 consciousness can rest on such a juxtaposition, which is merely ex- 
 ternal, although it ought to be treated with respect. 
 
 * 
 
 Neither can the subject be thoroughly understood by merely con- 
 sidering the Communion as the summit and end of the whole cele- 
 bration, if we continue to consider the taking of the sacrament as the 
 pledge and means of individual absolution and justification. The act 
 of justification of the individual corresponds with the inner regener- 
 ation, and its sacrament is baptism in the ancient sense, as the con- 
 firmation of the Christian instruction. To him who is thus regener- 
 ated the Church gives absolution : and it is a wholly unfounded 
 supposition of many modern authors, that the absolution belongs 
 to the Communion, and the Communion to the absolution. By 
 endeavouring in this manner to explain tlie Communion ethically 
 
CHRISTIAN SACRIFICE AND THE EUCHARIST. 375 
 
 but entirely individually, we lose the notion of the Communion. 
 But he only who is regenerated, and has been absolved after confess- 
 ing his sinfulness, may come to the Communion without condem- 
 nation. 
 
 * 
 
 The connection of the ideas of the ancient Church about the Com- 
 munion seems, on the contrary, reducible, in the simplest manner, to 
 the following views. 
 
 The most general signification of adoration is the inward act of the 
 consciousness of our dependence upon, and our separation from, God. 
 This being understood as ivord is prayer, as action sacrifice ; or, each 
 word spoken in that consciousness is prayer, each action performed in 
 that consciousness is sacrifice. The prayer itself, as manifesting 
 itself externally in speech, is sacrifice. 
 
 Each sacrifice expresses a prayer. 
 
 That consciousness, whether in prayer or in sacrifice, manifests 
 itself: 
 
 either as acknowledgment of our guilt, separation, and want of pro- 
 pitiation — confession, expiatory sacrifice ; 
 
 or as acknowledgment of our nothingness (dependence) and offering 
 of our thanks — thanksgiving, thanksoffering. 
 
 T\\Q prayer for something definite may be connected with both kinds, 
 but presupposes always the one or the other. Word and action are 
 only tokens of that inward consciousness, and are multifariously con- 
 nected with each other. Both are equally original tokens. The most 
 natural realization, however, is under the form of the action, in oppo- 
 sition to the word, because the inward consciousness itself appears as 
 an act of our inward life, as the active manifestation, and, as it were, 
 its pulsation. That is, therefore, the fundamental notion of the 
 sacrifice, in which that inward act exhibits itself more strikingly to 
 man. The subject and the object of the sacrifice (the offering and the 
 offered) are therefore identical in the real sacrifice ; viz. they are 
 united in man. All sacrifices of Judaism and heathenism (legis et 
 naturcB) are symbols of this sacrifice, which is primitive, founded upon 
 the nature of man, and consequently a token and indication of self- 
 sacrifice. The awful aberration of the human mind respecting human 
 sacrifices explains itself as a consequence of that idea having seized, 
 with all its power, upon a great and strong mind, confounded by super- 
 stition, savageness, or great crimes. 
 
 All sacrifices of natural religion and of the law, being symbolical 
 with regard to the inward act of individual life, arc figurative with 
 
 B B 4 
 
376 EPOCHS OF THE HISTORY OF THE 
 
 regard to the great historical centre of the universal life of mankind, 
 viz. Christ. 
 
 The sacrifices of the law are figurative in an eminent sense ; at first 
 on account of the historical connection with the historical fulfilment 
 of their manifestation ; and, secondly, because tlie monotheism of the 
 Law kept the fundamental notions together, whereas the polytheism of 
 the natural religions scattered them by connecting the sacrificial act 
 with the variety of natural existence, and of the special symbolism 
 which sprung from that variety. 
 
 Tlie details in the sacrifices of the Law, and in the great propitiatory 
 sacrifice, are only so far to be accepted figuratively, as Christ made 
 them so by his application to himself; an idea applicable to the figu- 
 rative sense in the Messianic prophecies. 
 
 Christ's life was a perfect inward sacrifice through his obedience, 
 and by his surrendering his will to the will of God : his death was 
 the seal and culminating point of this active and passive obedience as 
 the accomplishment of the Divine decrees. (See on this topic the 
 " German Theology.") Christ, according to his own declarations after 
 the resurrection, according to his own words before his death, recorded 
 in the Gospel of St. John, according to the doctrine of St. Paul in the 
 Epistle to the Romans, and according to the Epistle to the Hebrews 
 (making every allowance for Jewish ideas as to the expressions and 
 historical development of the argument), is essentially and really, and 
 therefore perpetually until the end of the world, the High Priest of the 
 faithful, as he has been the great propitiatory sacrifice during his earthly 
 existence. But as High Priest he is the mediator of the prayer of the 
 faithful. The prayer of the faithful becomes, through him and his 
 office as High Priest, a sacrifice in its real sense. The faithful are 
 called to be living sacrifices ; just as it is said to them : " Pray with- 
 out ceasing." (Rom. xii. 1. ; 1 Thess. v. 17.) 
 
 The foundation and fundamental idea of every Christian worship as 
 such, in opposition both to the deistic worship and to the Jewish and 
 Pagan, is therefore Christ's sacrifice, consummated by his surrendering 
 his life to the will of the Father. 
 
 First: Christ's sacrifice is the foundation of our prayer for the ab- 
 solution of sins (confession), being the propitiatory sacrifice for all men 
 and for all times, and as such also of all prayers. 
 
 Secondly : Christ's sacrifice is the central point of our thanks- 
 givings, all thanks and praise to God tending towards the thanksgivings 
 for the redemption in Christ. As far as all the faithful are called to 
 thank, this thanksgiving is a real offering of thanks. 
 
CHRISTIAN SACIilFICE AND THE EUCIIAUIST. 377 
 
 Thirdly : Christ's sacrifice is the basis of the consciousness of our 
 life in God, if that consciousness becomes adoration. This requires 
 further explanation. 
 
 The fact, by which we participate in the redemption as instituted 
 by Christ's death, by which it becomes real for us, is called Justifica- 
 tion with regard to God's decree. Regeneration with regard to men. 
 We have here only to consider the individual side of this spiritual fact. 
 It shows itself as individual life becoming conscious of the divine life. 
 But the individual conscience of man acknowledges besides and above 
 the unity of the individual, a higher unity in mankind, which may 
 be understood as tribe or nation, or altogether universal. The con- 
 summation of that process of growing consciousness consists therefore 
 in this, that the community of life becomes conscious of its existence 
 in the divine life. This advance is necessary ; for, on the religious 
 ground, man becomes conscious of his existence essentially as of a 
 common existence. Religion can no more be understood as the pro- 
 duce of individual life, than language could be as that of an individual ; 
 on the contrary, both are manifestations of the community of life, the 
 first in the direction towards God, the second towards the world — 
 towards the one and towards the manifold. (See " Outlines of the 
 Philosophy of the History of Mankind," Jan. 1816.) 
 
 The divine reality of universal life in a religious consciousness is 
 expressed in the third article of the creed. 
 
 The origin and the growth of this life in the members of the Church 
 is essentially an individual appropriation of the propitiatory death 
 of Christ. First of all, because it is a real self-sacrifice. For as such 
 the consciousness in the adoration is expressed, in relation to the 
 brethren and in relation to God. In relation to the brethren, as the 
 surrender of all selfishness, wrath, envy, hatred, and, in general, un- 
 charitableness ; in relation to God, in the surrender of our will unto 
 His — of our wishes unto obedience, of our hopes unto resignation. 
 Through these facts the universal Christian life of the Church, for the 
 sake of which Christ died, advances and grows. If herein consists 
 the appropriation of the propitiatory death of Christ, it follows that 
 both the culminating point of the Christian worship and the comme- 
 moration of Christ's death are inseparable. 
 
 So far the religious conscience develops itself merely on the ground 
 of the Apostolic creed. But the fact of the institution of the Lord's 
 Supper is to be joined with it. It follows from what has been said 
 above, that the partaking, commanded by Christ, of what he designates 
 by the words " This is my body," &c., presents itself necessarily as 
 
378 iiPOCHS OF THE HISTOEY OF THE 
 
 the positive ground of common worship in tlie relations indicated 
 above. The single parts of the sacred action are therefore also to be 
 connected with those ideas, but in such a way as not to deviate from 
 Christ's institution. 
 
 L The Oblatio of the ancient Church was, therefore, at first the 
 natural token of the prayers which were offered by the faithful instead 
 of the prefigurative and external gifts. These prayers may be three- 
 fold : first and principally, thanks and praise to God for the redemp- 
 tion through Christ ; secondly, such prayers as spring from this feeling ; 
 lastly, the vow to live in Christ, and the prayer for strength to be able 
 to do so. The Oblatio, viz. that which is offered, and the action of 
 offering it, was therefore, in the last sense, the token of the real Oblatio, 
 or of the self-offering. But this token was a natural one, because it 
 represented at the same time that ground on which we base thanks, 
 prayer, and self-sacrifice, and therefore the whole adoration. This 
 association of ideas stands in connection with the relation to God. 
 With regard to the relation to the partakers, the action of the Oblatio 
 is a token of the Communion, and that which is offered ( Oblatum) is 
 the pledge of it in its symbolical signification ; and it is not to be 
 wondered at that the mysticism of the ancient Church saw in the 
 material quality of the bread {ex tnultis unum factum), a symbol of the 
 Communion and unity of the faithful in the Church. 
 
 Those who offer {offerentes) are therefore, according to the outward 
 appearance, the single individuals, according to the real meaning, their 
 community (ecclesia, to kolvoi'). 
 
 That which is offered {oblatum) is according to the outward 
 appearance, the elements ; symbolically the prayer {preces), in the 
 highest sense the Church {ecclesia), the adoring faithful people 
 themselves ; sacramentally " Christi corpus et sanguis." 
 
 The oblatio is the action of offering agreeable donations to God, as 
 a token of our adoration, and as a token of the ground of this adora- 
 tion, Christ. 
 
 II. The Consecratio is 
 
 First : 
 
 The prayer for blessing the partaking of the Communion, and there- 
 fore a prayer for blessing the elements. This is called sanctificatio 
 according to the idea : everything is sanctified by the word of God. 
 
 Secondly : 
 
 The prayer for blessing the partakers. But as the partaking of it 
 presupposes a community, the Church, it is very natural that a general 
 intercessory prayer should follow it. The connection between token 
 
CHEISTIAN SACRIFICE AND THE EUCHARIST. 379 
 
 and meaning becomes necessarily more prominent here than in the 
 oblation. All that is prayed and thought is done with reference to 
 the approaching participation of the Communion, by which it becomes, 
 as it were, sealed ; the tokens themselves are considered already in 
 their sacramental meaning, and therefore to us, according to Christ's 
 promise, that on which our redemption is founded, and that which 
 renders possible the growth and accomplishment of our spiritual life 
 in the union with God. The vow of our self-sacrifice, connected with 
 the consecratio, therefore, may very naturally take place here together 
 with the prayer that God may accept, that is to say, consummate it, 
 and with the profession of our faith that he is willing to do it, and 
 will do it as far as we are Christ's members, and are to be one 
 with him. We have therefore: 
 
 consecratio elementoricm oblatorum, 
 
 consecratio precum oblatarum, 
 
 consecratio offerentium, ecclesice. 
 All this has no meaning as celebration of the Lord's Supper, without 
 a following communio, even less than the oblatio would have without 
 the consecratio. The pious contemplation of the truths of religion to 
 which these actions refer may certainly be the object of devotion ; 
 one may understand the possibility that it should be made the found- 
 ation of an ecclesiastical service, but it is never, and can never become, 
 the celebration of the Lord's Supper. 
 
 III. The Communio^ the consummation of what has been prayed 
 for in faith : 
 
 In relation to bread and wine, as far as they are the means of grace, 
 spiritual nourishment, and the strengthening of spiritual life : 
 
 In relation to the partakers, as far as they participate in the redemp- 
 tion through Christ, and in his propitiatory death, in such a way that 
 Christ's life in the faithful (the life of the Church, the being of the 
 Holy Spirit) is growing through them, and that they die to the world 
 and live in God. 
 
 IV. Postcomnnmio. After the communio, the religious feeling is 
 first expressed as thanks for the blessing that has been received ; and 
 it is quite natural that the vow, which spi'ings from the feeling of this 
 blessing, should be expressed at this place, and that the real oblatio 
 (the self-offering) should become connected with the gratiarum actio 
 of the j)ostcommunio. 
 
380 EPOCHS OF THE HISTORY OF THE 
 
 All that has been said proves liow differently the parts of this cele- 
 bration may be developed, without deviating from Christ's institutions 
 and without effacing the fundamental idea of the Christian worship. 
 The ancient liturgies would show this difference by the side of the 
 unity of the fundamental idea (as, in a similar manner, languages do, 
 that are formed among spiritually kindred nations), if the composition 
 of written formularies had not happened at rather a late period, 
 and if the Roman Church had not succeeded first in suppressing the 
 original rites which differed from the Roman ritual, and afterwards 
 in destroying and partly adulterating those monuments. An impartial 
 and conscientious study of the ecclesiastical authors of the first four 
 centuries would establish both the unity of consciousness in the ancient 
 Church and the difference of that fundamental idea. This would give 
 an inward history of the development of the Christian worship, which 
 ought to be the central point of a Christian ecclesiastical history. 
 
 The circumstances which separate the epochs of this development 
 coincide exactly with the great epochs of general ecclesiastical history. 
 
 1. The separation of the Christian worship from the Jewish service, 
 nearly cotemporary with the destruction of Jerusalem. — The whole, 
 individual and common, pious and historical, religious consciousness 
 connected itself now necessarily in a much more comprehensive manner 
 with the celebration of the Lord's Supper. The persecution and 
 oppression of the Christians must, of course, have called forth the 
 whole efficacy of the Communion with regard to the union of the par- 
 takers among themselves, as well as with regard to God and Christ. 
 This I would call the consciousness of the Church as the community 
 of Christ, efficacious for sanctifying the fundamental relations of human 
 existence. 
 
 2. The triumph of the Christian religion in the Roman empire; the 
 consciousness of the Church as to her vocation to busy herself with 
 the affairs of civil life, as she had previously done with domestic life. 
 — The ablatio became necessarily an action of long duration in the 
 principal Churches ; its solemnity necessarily increased from its 
 worldly importance ; the stewards of the sanctuary alone ruled in its 
 precincts, whereas the laymen, including the lords of this world, 
 stepped from their seats into the chancel only for a moment in order 
 to offer their gifts. There was a growing tendency to propitiate 
 and conquer the heathen element by giving more solemnity and dignity 
 to the service. The consecratio contained the prayers for the empire 
 of the world ; it was also for its preservation that the hostia immaculata 
 was offered and consecrated by prayer. The dogmatical controversies 
 
CHRISTIAN SACRIFICE AND THE EUCHARIST, 381 
 
 penetrated into both parts, the oblatio and the consecratio, modifying 
 the ceremonies as well as the prayers. But the communio sank, whilst 
 the preparatory service rose. " In vain," St. Chrysostora exclaims, 
 " we stand at the altar to administer the sacrament : you remain aloof." 
 Hence the Communion of the clergy sometimes without the people com- 
 municating, although they remained present. But without Communion 
 there was no celebration of the Lord's Supper, and indeed scarcely 
 any common worship without this celebration. All examples of the 
 contrary (brought forward to prove a celebration without Communion) 
 are futile proofs of ignorance or of dishonesty. 
 
 At least half a century elapsed in this epoch, before a fixed liturgy 
 was composed in writing. The order of celebration, to which eccle- 
 siastical writers refer from whose works the terms of those liturgies 
 are in part borrowed (and which have as much right to bear their 
 names as some others have those of the evangelists and apostles), was 
 in general very similar to the order of those later liturgies ; but the 
 single prayers, especially those of consecration, were, according to the 
 testimony of St. Basil, nowhere fixed. Nevertheless, all extant 
 liturgies preserve the consciousness of the Communion being the central 
 point of the celebration, the preceding parts having been interpolated 
 considerably later. Had the Codex Barberinus, once in the library of 
 San Marco, not lost the Quinternio which contained the consecration 
 (and who can suppose the loss accidental when Bessarion and Leo 
 Allatius had a hand in it?), we should have an authentic record of this 
 part of the service at least as old as the seventh century. The 
 essential points, however, may still be discovered by comparing the 
 more ancient Oriental translations with the Greek manuscripts. 
 
 It is remarkable that the regulation of the Canon, which was 
 ordered to be made by G regory the Great, and which has become of 
 such importance for the history of the world, emanates from a man who 
 is only known to us as " Scholasticus." A prolixity of the prayers be- 
 tween the sanctus (being the end of the gratiarum actio) and the words 
 of Institution, viz. of the oblatio in the stricter sense, foi'ms its prin- 
 cipal peculiarity. This part is the more ancient element, only that, 
 in its original form, it may have contained the conseci-ation also. The 
 dogmatic system of the next period could not have developed itself in 
 the way it did out of the liturgy of the Spanish (Visigothic) Church. 
 
 3. The Consciousness of the Church as an external visible institu- 
 tion (abstracte). — The ancient consciousness of the Church as being 
 the unity of the faithful, and existing only in them, is now by a me- 
 tastasis transferred to this domain (that of the Church as government). 
 
382 EPOCHS OF THE HISTORY OF THE 
 
 This becomes evident from tlie decay of the real oblatio, and the 
 prevalence of the custom of celebrating mass without any Communion; 
 so that the priest makes it the form of his official prayer, and thus 
 represents externally, by his praying and receiving, the inner action 
 of the faithful in the Communion. 
 
 The inquiries hitherto made have advanced so far as to show that 
 the epoch of this change is the ninth century, in which also were 
 written the influential commentaries of Paschasius Radbertus, Wa- 
 lafrid Strabo, Amalarius, and others. But still Walafrid says 
 expressly, one must confess that at least three persons are necessary 
 for the celebration of mass : celebrans, viinistrans, offerens. 
 
 4. When the oblation had become an obsolete custom, the ecclesias- 
 tical idea of the oblatio was retained. It then became necessary to 
 strengthen that ceremony by spiritualizing it. Every symbolicism 
 becomes more free when it loses its substratum, and the symbolical 
 explanation develops itself independently. As this threw the com- 
 miinio still more into the background, so on the other hand the 
 spreading of the misscB solitaricB raised the importance of the symbo- 
 lical oblation and consecration. 
 
 From that tiige the Canon of the Latin Church, with the exception 
 of Spain, became universal, and in the West was considered in the 
 same light as the Bible, viz. as the materiaVof devotion. The text is 
 interpreted according to an idea which is unhistorically conceived and 
 developed. The more prominent part of the liturgy, viz. the oblation 
 and consecration, became the basis of this system, and the central 
 point of celebration was fixed in the act of consecration : the subject 
 of the oblation (the offering person) being understood throughout to 
 be the Church hierarchy, or what is called in the modern sense the 
 Communion of the Saints. If we imagine, on the other hand, the 
 vitality and creative power of the inner religious life, which received 
 its direction and form from the most eminent minds of Europe, we 
 cannot wonder that the inexhaustible^ and indelible mysticism of 
 feeling concerning the adoration as a sacrifice became rapidly more 
 and more fixed, and coalesced more intimately with the view of the 
 propitiatory sacrifice of the Church. For the task of a philosophical 
 and historical explanation had become impossible. The consciousness 
 of the Church moved, as by a charm, within this circle, and could not 
 satisfy itself but by the strongest expressions as to the reality of an 
 ecclesiastical reproduction of the sacrifice. 
 
 5. It was only in the thirteenth century that the offertory became 
 developed spiritually by the Franciscans, and was received into the 
 
CHRISTIAN SACRIFICE AND THE EUCHARIST. 383 
 
 mass ; a set of prayers, that God would mercifully accept the oblatiOy 
 were used instead of the psalm verses formerly sung by the choir 
 during the offering of the people. 
 
 6. It is not clear at what time the practice commenced, now pre- 
 valent in the Latin Church, at least at Rome, of never giving the 
 Communion to the people during the mass, as was formerly always 
 done. Whenever there is a Communion of the people, the priest 
 reads mass, to which the people listen, and after the postcommunio 
 has been read, and the benediction given, the laity receive the host. 
 
384 
 
 III. 
 
 THE NATURE OF THE CHRISTIAN SACRIFICE. 
 
 (Extract from a Letter to the late Rct. Dr. Nott, Winchester. Dated : On the 
 Capitol, Christmas-day, 1829.) 
 
 The idea of sacrifice is so much the natural and necessary foundation 
 of every religious worship, that it appears as such, not only in the 
 dispensation of God's revelations by the Scripture, but in all Pagan re- 
 ligions, from the Hindoo and Greek down to the negro and the inhabi- 
 tant of California. The horrors and abominations which the desire of 
 effecting the sacrifice produced, for instance in the service of Moloch, 
 prove only how deeply the same is founded in human nature. When 
 man feels his indestructible connection with the Divinity, in conse- 
 quence of that voice of conscience, which St. Paul mentions when 
 speaking of the Pagans, this connection appears to him either that of 
 a dependence upon an almighty and benevolent power, or that of a 
 separation from a more intimate connection, a real union broken by 
 acts which provoked the divine wrath. The first feeling will prompt 
 him to thank, the second to attempt to propitiate. As his prayers 
 will be those of thanksgiving or those of penitence, so the acts by 
 which he feels the want to show and manifest his feelings, will be at- 
 tempts either to thank God or to soothe his wrath. All such acts fall 
 under the idea and denomination of sacrifice, which implies that what 
 is offered to God as a gift is considered on the one side as our pro- 
 perty and part of ourselves, and on the other as belonging to Him. 
 All sacrifices, therefore, are sacrifices o^ praise and thanksgiving (sa- 
 crificia laudis, ^vaUu EvxapiariKai), or of atonement (sacrificia propitia- 
 toria, Bvaiai IXacrTi'ipiai). 
 
 Now, it is a mere corollary from the first truth revealed to us 
 by Scripture on the fall of mankind, that man by himself could neither 
 effect such a real atonement for his sins as might appease divine 
 justice, nor that act of thanksgiving which would answer eternal love. 
 For, in order to offer this latter sacrifice, his mind ought to be first 
 entirely relieved and delivered from the consciousness of sin and of the 
 divine wrath, that is to say, a perfect, everlasting, and all-relieving 
 
ON THE NATURE OF THE CHRISTIAN SACRIFICE. 385 
 
 catonement ought first to have been found ; and again, there being and 
 remaining the fear and consciousness of the divine wrath in the mind 
 of tlie natural man when approaching the Deity, every attempt to find 
 and eflfect such an atonement by offering even the dearest thing or 
 person, or by excruciating himself, must only increase the despair of 
 being reconciled to God, or confirm men in external I'ites and cere- 
 monies. 
 
 Only one way remained, therefore, for a divine revelation which for 
 ages would prepare wliat was once to be accomplished, and this is the 
 system of the Levitical worship and sacrifice, as a type, and as such 
 a consoling promise and hope of what was reserved to the people of 
 God, and through the same to all the nations of the earth. 
 
 The sacrifices of the Old Testament are typical, and according to 
 tlieir peculiar character, all sacrifices of thanksgiving, with the excep- 
 tion of that one great and awful sacrifice of propitiation or atonement, 
 which in its typical nature is so clearly described and explained in 
 the Epistle to the Hebrews. Christ was the real victim of pro- 
 pitiation, his death the only all-satisfactory sacrifice of atonement. 
 
 It is now necessary to establisli that the sacrifices of the other 
 order were also typical, that they did not end, but begin, with the 
 great sacrifice of propitiation, and that they form that true and per- 
 fect worship of God in Christ, which we are called to perform. It is 
 clear, from the elementary principles just laid down, that the atone- 
 ment having once been found, the possibility was attained of ac- 
 complishing the real sacrifice of gratitude, of offering up the perfect 
 thanksgiving. For he who believes in the atonement of Christ can 
 approach God the Father with that feeling of pure gratitude and love 
 which is not disturbed by the fear which the consciousness of our sin- 
 ful state and our past sins necessarily creates and carries with it. 
 Let us now examine more closely what the offering of gratitude, or 
 the sacrifice of thanks and praise, means when considered in the light 
 of the Gospel. 
 
 The Christian feels, that not only whatever he has, but also what- 
 ever he is, he has and is by the gift and grace of his Heavenly Father, 
 and that his life and he himself belong to God, and are to be conse- 
 crated to his service. He therefore can only sliow his filial gratitude 
 by offering himself and his whole life as a living sacrifice unto God. 
 To do this the Cliristian is expressly exhorted by St. Paul in the 
 twelfth chapter of the Epistle to the Romans, and by St. Peter in that 
 wonderful passage (1 Ep. ii. 6 — 9.) which contains the whole doctrine 
 of Christian sacrifice, and of the true and reasonable service. The 
 
 VOL. II. C C 
 
386 ON THE NATURE OF 
 
 same Is said lastly in the Epistle to the Hebrews (xiii. 15.): "By 
 Him therefore let us offer the sacrifice of praise to God continually, 
 that is, the fruit of our lips, giving thanks to his name." This 
 worship, therefore, is understood by the words of our Saviour, where 
 he says (St. John, iv. 24.) : " God is a Spirit, and they that worship 
 him must worship him in spirit and in truih^'' all other worship being 
 either external, or only a shadow of the truth revealed by and through 
 Christ. 
 
 It seems evident that what is to be the principle of the whole life 
 of the Christian is also to be the principal and central point of that 
 part of it which is consecrated by divine institution, and by an inter- 
 nal necessity of the human mind, to the common worship or service 
 of God in pai-ticular. 
 
 But it is necessary here to enter more fully into the nature of this 
 service, as being not only a sacrifice, but the only possible, real, and 
 true one, the sacrifice of redeemed man. As Christ was the only real 
 victim of propitiation, so He is at once the only High Priest to us, who 
 are priests and victims oui-selves in gratitude, but only so far as we 
 belong to his spiritual body, his real Church ; and therefore, in the 
 last instance, it must be said, that as Christ effected the only good 
 and valid sacrifice of propitiation, thus He alone accomplished in His 
 spiritual body the only good and valid sacrifice of praise and thanks. 
 The former sacrifice was once made by Christ during the thirty-three 
 years of his life on earth, and sealed by his death : the second is 
 continually being made, through the succession of ages, from the 
 moment of his ascension to heaven till liis second coming. The 
 substratum of the former is his own human body ; that of the 
 second is his spiritual body, the number of his elect, which is 
 growing and increasing through all nations and ages to the final 
 consummation of all things. 
 
 After having thus explained what we mean by saying that the 
 Christian offers the real sacrifice of praise and thanksgiving by offer- 
 ing himself, we may repeat without being misunderstood, that in this 
 real sacrifice, of which all others were only shadows or types, man 
 united the functions of priest and of victim, of him who offers and of 
 the thing offered. In all false and typical sacrifices subject and 
 object were distinct, and became only united by acts of insanity and 
 abomination, which acts on the other hand proved the inward 
 consciousness, that the only real sacrifice is the human and self- 
 offering sacrifice. 
 
 It is only, I presume, by considering the nature of the Christian 
 
THE CnRLSTIAN SACRIFICE. 387 
 
 sacrifice, as the perpetual, constantly renewed act of gratitude and 
 self-sacrifice of every redeemed soul in Christ's Church, or, if I may 
 use such an expression, as the pulsation of the Christian life 
 continuing through all ages, that we can thoroughly explain why 
 neither the Saviour nor his Apostles left us any more distinct 
 command and injunctions as to the form of the Christian service. 
 Not only was its foundation, its central point, distinctly laid down, \ 
 but also the celebration of the Lord's Supper as the sacred remem- . 
 brance of his sacrifice and atonement, had been enjoined as the 
 object of the Christian service in public worship.* The act of the , 
 redeemed Christian off"ering up himself as a living sacrifice of praise 
 and thanks was to be sealed by the remembrance of the act of 
 Christ, the atoning Saviour, which alone gives the Christian that 
 free access to the Father which enables him to perform this act 
 of gratitude in full hope and firm belief that He will ratify it, and 
 hold it acceptable through Jesus Christ and on account of his merits. 
 The spiritual food which we receive in the Lord's Supper, as it is in 
 general a nourishment for the regenerate soul, so is it in particular a 
 means of grace for being filled with that filial gratitude, and with 
 that fraternal charity towards all men, which alone can make us offer 
 ourselves to God with as much sincerity as humility, resign our will 
 unto His holy will, and aspire to the perfect freedom of the children 
 of God by giving up our self-will and self-love to his divine service. 
 The worthy remembrance of the great sacrifice of atonement prompts 
 us to make the holy vow of a consecration of ourselves in that 
 spirit of thankfulness, by which the receiving of Christ's body and 
 blood manifests its blessing within us. It is the sign and manifest- 
 ation of that spiritual life which Christ has promised to feed and to 
 strengthen by the partaking of his body and blood in faith. Christ 
 feeds the members of his spiritual body, the faithful considered as 
 one, his Church, by the sacramental signs and consecrated symbols 
 of his own personal body and blood. This same truth may also be 
 expressed in the following manner. The Church (viz. the real 
 members of Christ's body united in brotherly fellowship, and ruled by 
 Christ's word) in receiving Him, who oflTered Himself to be an ever- 
 lastinty propitiation for her, filled with gi'atitude and filial tliank- 
 
 * This passage would be more clearly and correctly expressed thus : 
 Its foundation, its central point, was not only distinctly laid down, but 
 also connected with the celebration of the Lord's Supper, as with the sacred 
 remembrance of his sacrifice and atonement, when this celebration bccauie a 
 part of the public Christian worsliip. (1851.) 
 
 c c 2 
 
388 • ON THE NATURE OF 
 
 fulness, offers up herself as a living saci-ifice of praise. Or : the 
 Church receiving Christ's sacramental body and blood, expresses her 
 gratitude, and manifests that life which is become her own as a living 
 member of Clirist's spiritual body, by offering up herself in gratitude 
 and praise. 
 
 It is clear, that this truth, as simple as it is profound, may 
 be expressed in many different ways : even that it must be expressed 
 in different ways, according to the development of Christ's Church on 
 earth, and of her consciousness of the internal grounds of her 
 actions, according to the times and circumstances in which she finds 
 herself, according to national character, and according to the indivi- 
 dual moving of the Spirit within her. Thus, as the immortal Hooker 
 so beautifully proves, even the Apostolical Church, if we had what 
 we are totally without, the exact words and rites according to which 
 the Apostles, in their various Churches, celebrated the Christian 
 service, could not be, as to the letter and in its particulars, a model for 
 all future times. It is its spirit, its fundamental regulations, which 
 are to be followed by us, as the expression and working of that 
 Divine Spirit, which dwelt so particularly in her. 
 
 But it is also clear, that the two great central points, the sacra- 
 mental remembrance of the one sacrifice, and the offering up of the 
 other, both prepared by the heai'ing of the word of God, and by the 
 sincere acknowledgment of our sins and the profession of our faith, 
 and aided finally by those means which present themselves as useful 
 and salutary — it is also clear, I say, that these two great central 
 points of the Christian service must have created and maintained, 
 in the Christian Churches, a certain typical uniformity and that 
 consensus universalis of the Churches, spread in different parts of the 
 world, which at once will be the proof of their universal (Catholic) 
 spirit and of their Christian liberty. 
 
 No fact in universal history is better proved than this. Striking 
 as the differences and peculiai'ities of the several ancient Churches 
 are, their uniformity is still more striking, and really wonderful. It 
 is the same with the expressions of the Fathers of the Church about 
 the Christian sacrifice. All their expressions and allusions, all their 
 expositions and deductions, can only be explained and understood by 
 that fundamental view of the Christian sacrifice, which has been laid 
 down in these pages. Sacrifice is, and remains, the word expressing 
 the essence of the service : the same word is used to denote that 
 sacrifice which we commemorate in our prayers, which we confess 
 in our creed, the blessed remembrance of whicli we celebrate in 
 
THE CHRISTIAN SACRIFICE. 389 
 
 the Lord's Supper, and likewise that sacrifice which is the constant 
 act and manifestation of the Church herself, the praise and thanks- 
 giving which, in the perfect sense of the word, is nothing but 
 tlie offering up of ourselves in charity and love, to the will of 
 our Heavenly Father and for tlie good of our brethren. In a similar 
 way the name of this sacrifice of praise (^Ev-^^npiaria) denotes also the 
 celebration of the Lord's Supper, which is necessarily connected with 
 the same. 
 
 Of all the Fathers of the Church no one speaks so profoundly on 
 this awful subject as the great and immortal bishop of Hippon, St. 
 Augustin, who, in the tenth book of his Civitas Dei, expounds the 
 Cliristian doctrine of sacrifice. The sixth chapter of that book is par- 
 ticularly important ; it begins with the definition of sacrifice : " A 
 true sacrifice is every work which is done that we may be connected 
 with God by holy fellowship, that is, referred to that end of all good 
 by which we can be truly happy." * 
 
 He then goes on to show that even a work of charity, or of tempe- 
 rance and abstinence, if it be not done on account of God (propter 
 Deum), is not a sacrifice. But we are commanded by the Apostle to 
 do such acts from this motive (Rom. xii. 1.) : "I beseech you, there- 
 fore, brethren, by the mercies of God, that ye present your bodies a 
 living sacrifice, holy, acceptable unto God, vv^hich is your reasonable 
 service." He adds most beautifully : " How much more then does 
 tlie soul become a sacrifice, when it gives itself entirely up to God that 
 it may be kindled by his divine love, and thus may lose the form of 
 worldly concupiscence, being remodelled by becoming subject to him 
 who is, as it were, the immutable form, and become acceptable to Him 
 by what it received from His beauty ! And this is what the Apostle 
 says in what follows: 'And be not conformed to this world: but be 
 ye transformed by the renewing of your mind, that ye may prove, 
 what is that good and acceptable and perfect will of God.' Since, 
 therefore, the true sacrifices are works of mercy, either directed 
 towards ourselves, or towards our neighbour ; and whereas Avorks of 
 mercy are done for no other purpose but in order to free us from 
 misery, and render us thus blessed — and this is only done by that 
 good of which it is said, ' It is good for me to draw near to God ; ' 
 it follows that the whole redeemed people (civitas), that is to say, the 
 congregation and society of the Saints (faithful), is offered up to God 
 
 * " Verum sacrificium est omne opus quod agitur, ut sancta societate 
 inhaereamus Deo, relatum scilicet ad ilium fiiiem boni quo veraciter bcati 
 osse possimus." 
 
 c c a 
 
390 ON THE NATURE OF 
 
 as a universal sacrifice by the High Priest, who, in his passion, offered 
 himself up for us in the form of a servant that we might become the 
 body of so great a head. For this form of a servant he offered up, in 
 this form he was offei'ed up : because, touching this, he is the mediator, 
 in this same he is the priest, in this the sacrifice. Therefore the 
 Apostle continues: Tor I say, through the grace given unto me, to 
 every man that is among you, not to think of himself more highly than 
 lie ought to think; but to think soberly, according as God hath dealt 
 to every man the measure of faith. For as we have many members 
 in one body, and all members have not the same olBce ; so we being 
 many are one body in Christ, and every one members one of another?' 
 This is the sacrifice of Christians, ' many being one body in Christ.' 
 And this, in the sacrament of the altar, known to the faithful, the 
 Church celebrates, where she is taught that, in that thing [Chi-ist's 
 sacramental body] which she offers up, she herself is offered tip." * 
 
 Neither this passage ?^o^■ an^ other in any ancient Father can be un- 
 derstood, if ajiplied to the doctrine of the sacrifice of the mass, accord- 
 ing to which the perpetual sacrifice of the Christian Church is a pro- 
 pitiatory one, and not one of praise, consisting not in the spiritual 
 
 * " Quanto niagis aniina ipsa, cum se refert ad Deum, ut igne amoris 
 ejus accensa, formam concupiscentife secularis amittat eique tanquam in- 
 commutabili format subdita reformetur, hinc ei placens, quod ejus pulcLri- 
 tudine acceperit, fit sacrificium ! Quod idem Apostolus consequenter ad- 
 jungens : '■ JEt nolite,' inquit, '■ coiiformari hide scectdo : sed reformamini in 
 novitate mentis vestrce, ad j^rohandum vos, quce sit voluntas Dei, quod honum et 
 heneplacitum et perf actum ^ Cum igitur vera sacrificia opera sint misericordiae, 
 sive in nos ipsos, sive in proximos, quae referuntur ad Deum, opera vero 
 mlserlcordise non ob aliud fiant, nisi ut a miseria liberemur, ac per hoc ut 
 beati simus ; quod non fit, nisi bono illo, de quo scriptum est : Milii autem 
 adhcerere Deo honum est; profecto efiicitur, ut tota ipsa redemta civitas, hoc 
 est congregatio societasque sanctorum, universale sacrificium offeratur Deo 
 per sacerdotem magnum, qui etiam se ipsum obtulit in passione ju'O nobis, ut 
 tanti capitis corpus essemus, secundum formam servi. Ilanc enim obtulit, 
 in Lac oblatus est ; quia secundum banc mediator est, in hac sacerdos, In bac 
 
 sacrificium est ' Dico enijn,' inquit, ' joer gratiam Dei, 
 
 quae data est mihi, omnibus, qui sunt in vobis, non plus sapere, quam oportel 
 sapere, sed sapere ad temperantiam, sicut unicuique Deus pai'titus est secundum 
 mensuram. Sicut enim in uno corpore mrdta membra habemus, omnia autem 
 membra non eosdem actus habent, ita multi unum corpus sumus'in Christo ; singuli 
 aidem, alter alterius memhrce, habentes dona diversa secundum gratiam, quce 
 data est nobis.'' Hoc est sacrificium Christianorum : ' midti unum corpus in 
 Christo' Quod etiam sacramento altaris fidelibus noto frequentat ecclesia, 
 ubi el demonstratur, quod in ea re, quam ofiert, ipsa ofieratur." 
 
THE CHRISTIAN SACRIFICE. 391 
 
 self-offering of the faithful, who are taught by the word of God, and 
 refreshed by the sacramental body of Christ, but in the saying of the 
 Avords of consecration, or rather in the repetition of the words of the 
 Institution of the Sacrament, made by the priest over the host. 
 
 No change ever was greater, no perversion had ever more pernicious 
 results for the whole history of Christ's Church, and still none was 
 easier, was more natural, and as it were necessary, so soon as the 
 fundamental ideas of Church, Priesthood, and Sacrifice were perverted 
 from their highest spiritual sense to the outward and heathenish one, 
 according to which the Church is the governing body of Christ's 
 faithful people. Priests are the ministei's of the Church, and there- 
 tore sacrifice is the sacred work or actixjn which these priests perform 
 as such. As soon as the promises made to the real Church of God 
 (which is contained in the external Church, as the believers were in 
 the ark) are applied in their full extent to this external Church and 
 even its governors, and as soon as the right and duty of spiritual 
 priesthood exercised by every Christian under the one great High 
 Priest are superseded by the acts and privileges of the officiating 
 ministers of that Church, the Communion becomes an accessory only 
 to the consecration, that is to say, to the formal act of the priest ; and 
 the perpetuity of sacrifice, taught by Malachi and by the whole Scrip- 
 ture, as well as by the Fathers, instead of being found in the ever- 
 new act of self-offering of regenerated souls in the holy fellowship of 
 Christ's Church, must be looked for in the never-ceasing repetition 
 of that act of conseci-ation as being a repetition of the one great act of 
 atonement made on the cross. 
 
 The great epoch in ecclesiastical history, which I consider as the 
 critical point in the history of the liturgy, is the Jifth century. At 
 that period the Communion ceased to be generally frequented by all 
 the faithful present, except suchas.were prohibited by the canons of the 
 Church from drawing near the altar. Down to this period the real 
 ivyci^iuTia, the real act of the Christian service, the offering up of the 
 assembled people, as of one, to God in praise and thankfulness, was ne- 
 cessarily connected with the celebration of the Communion. The ex- 
 pressions relating to the sacrifice offered up, and those belonging to the 
 sacrifice commemorated, were always united in the same service ; so 
 that, for instance, the Prcpfatio, " Sursum corda " (a formula which had 
 become of almost universal usage even in the second century, as the 
 beginning of the solemn offering of praise and thanksgiving), might 
 appear also as the beginning of the celebration of the Communion, 
 although it is evident that it must be attributed exclusively to the 
 
 c c 4 
 
392 ■ ON THE NATURE OF 
 
 iirst, and not to the second, as soon as tlie liturgy for the one (the 
 standing and unchangeable centre of the service) is to be separated 
 from the celebration of the Sacrament. The separation of these two 
 so very distinct elements ought at that time to have been made, in 
 order to preserve the purity and independence of the spiritual cha- 
 racter of the Christian sacrifice, as well as the right sense of the 
 celebration of the Lord's Supper according to the Institution. But 
 this separation undoubtedly then seemed dangerous : the spiritual 
 sense of Christianity was already lowered ; probably it was feared 
 that the positive sense of sacrifice might dwindle into a deistical or 
 sentimental one, and hopes were entertained that the people might 
 one day return to the use of the ancient Church, and all receive the 
 Communion at every Communion service. 
 
 The nest step was the celebrating of the Communion by the 
 clergy ministering at the altar : after this the last step was unavoid- 
 able, namely the celebration of the Communion by the officiating 
 priest alone, that is to say, without any Communion (in the old 
 sense) taking place. 
 
 / All these changes were merely liturgical, but every liturgical 
 ' change reacts necessarily on the doctrine. The consecration and 
 the showing of the consecrated host became the most conspicuous 
 part of the service ; on that act being performed, the faithful were to 
 remember the passion of Christ, and the institution of his blessed 
 Sacrament. The doctrine of Transubstantiation itself was only a 
 consequence of this practical view pi-oduced by the liturgy ; a scho- 
 lastic consequence, the denial of which seemed inconsistent with that 
 practice. Such is the character of human nature, that unless it be 
 guided by divine revelation, it will find out and substitute an outward 
 practice for the inward act, and supply, by an external rite, the want 
 of the spiritual act which man is commanded to perform, and which 
 he feels the need of when not misdirected. Hitherto the Church had 
 only known such expressions as these : Christ offered himself up for 
 the Church — the Church offers up herself^ and as signs of this act of 
 her own, she (the faithful people) brings or offers to the altar her 
 gifts (oblations) as well as her prayers. But now a third expression 
 came into use : the Church offers up Christ, by repeating on the altar 
 the consecration of his body made on the cross. If this is to be the 
 Christian sacrifice, then the real body once offered, and the sacra- 
 mental body now unceasingly offered on the altar, must be the same, 
 must be identical, otherwise, the Christian sacrifice would be void and 
 only a shadow, whereas it must contain reality as well as be perpetual. 
 
THE CHRISTIAN SACRIFICE. 393 
 
 The doctrine of Ti-ansubstantiation, closely connected as it is with 
 the substitution of the sacrifice of consecration for the spiritual and 
 only real one, of the souls of the united foithful people, is therefore 
 far from being the central point of controversy. The whole question 
 which has principally engaged the attention of Protestant divines in 
 their controversies with tlie Romish Church, and given rise to the great 
 division in the Protestant Church itself, viz., " What is the effect of 
 the 'prayers of consecration (which are preceded by the words of In- 
 stitution, and do not consist in these words alone) on the elements ? " 
 is one which lies entirely out of the view of the ancient Church. It 
 never formed a distinct object of the consideration of her Fathers, or 
 the deliberations of her Councils : many orthodox Fathers would have 
 declared it an indifferent point, others a point not to be answered ; 
 none would have given his peculiar opinion as a point of doctrine. 
 The question was not started, till the whole centre of Christian 
 worship had been changed ; and it was one of the evils entailed by the 
 Romish Church on the new Reformed one, that even her own in- 
 ternal discussions moved on this point, and made that answer a point 
 of paramount importance, and a ground of schism and separation. 
 
 The Reformed Churches all agreed with one voice, as by inspira- 
 tion, that the blessed Communion had been changed into a mere re- 
 presentation of the same in which no communion took place. They 
 proved that the spiritual sacrifice of the Fathers was widely diflferent 
 from the sacrifice of the Mass, and laid down the principle that no 
 celebration of the Lord's Supper was allowable except there were 
 communicants. 
 
 This was the second critical period of the old Greek and Latin 
 Church ; none of its canons had yet pronounced, as a doctrine, the 
 liturgical yV/c^ established by the usage of centuries, " that the sacri- 
 fice of the Mass was essentially a propitiatory one." The Council of 
 Trent made this declaration, which may be considered the death- 
 blow of the Romish Church, though intended to support and to main- 
 tain it ; and the later Fathers of that same Church were constantly 
 more and more agreed upon the further conclusion which completes 
 the new system, that the central point of this sacrifice is the con- 
 secration, which the Romanists always incorrectly consider to be the 
 recital of the words of Institution. Bossuet is most decided on this 
 point ; communion with him is only an accessory, the feeding of those 
 who are present on the flesh of the victim of propitiation ; and feeling 
 how much this is at variance with the type of the Levitical worship, 
 where it is declared an abomination to eat of the flesh of the victim 
 
394 ON THE NATURE OF THE CHRISTIAN SACRIFICE. 
 
 consecrated for propitiation, he took upon himself to declare this to 
 be a great mystery of the new covenant. 
 
 The real point of controversy is therefore about the nature of the 
 Christian sacrifice. It is easy to establish the doctrine of the spi- 
 ritual sacrifice of praise and thanks, but the most profound writers 
 among the Roman Catholics (as Pascal and the whole school of Port 
 Royal) abound in this sense. But the real point of controversy, in 
 its most particular form, may be reduced to this : 
 
 "Is the doctrine of the Council of Trent incompatible or not with 
 that doctrine of the spii-itual sacrifice ? " 
 
 They wish to represent us as heretics, the characteristic of which 
 always is, to believe only a part of the truth. They pretend that, 
 according to their doctrine, as much stress is laid on the spiritual 
 sacrifice by them as by the Reformed, who, according to their view, 
 have given up and lost the sacrifice altogether, and reduced their 
 worship to a mere deistical meeting to hear a sermon. 
 
 It must therefore be the final object of the Reformed Christian 
 Church, to show, not only what the real sacrifice of Chi-istians is, but 
 also to make it the central point of her own service, which is the viva 
 vox ecclesicB, more powerfully influential than all books of doctrine ; 
 and thus to prove, that, in its most perfect and pure sense, this 
 Christian sacrifice cannot be established and understood, so long 
 as the sacrifice of the Mass is not abolished. 
 
 The most natural, general, and energetic way of thus placing the 
 truth of Christianity in opposition to its degeneration is tliei'efore by 
 the Liturgy ; and, in order to effect this, we necessarily must do 
 what the Church of the fifth century did not choose to do, and what 
 the Reformers of the sixteenth century were prevented from doing 
 by many circumstances, and particularly by the gross abuses which 
 had crept into the Church through the perversion of the meaning of 
 the awful word Sacrifice. These immortal men discovered the 
 whole truth, as their writings prove ; but when the time was 
 come for the Churches, reformed by their heroic efforts, to have 
 organized themselves according to the actual state of the Church and 
 the new elements of devotion produced by the Reformation, the new 
 controversies which had sprung up directed their attention to other 
 points. Here and there also the great spirit of those men had dis- 
 appeared, and others with a more contracted and limited view of 
 Christian doctrine and Christian Church, at all events not possessing 
 the grand and extensive ideas which characterized those heroes of the 
 Gospel, had taken their place 
 
395 
 
 SECOND SECTION. 
 
 ESSAYS ON THE CONSTITUTION OF THE ANCIENT CHURCH. 
 
 THE APOSTOLICAL CONSTITUTIONS; THEIR GENERAL CHARACTER, 
 ORIGIN, AND IMPORTANCE. 
 
 There was a book in the ante-Nicene Church, in that age 
 which as a whole we may call the Apostolic, and of which 
 Hippolytus, Origen, and Cyprian represent the latter part — 
 there was among the Christians of those two centuries a book, 
 called Apostolic in an eminent sense, as being the work of all 
 the Apostles. It was a book more read than any one of the 
 writings of the Fathers, and in Church matters of greater weight 
 than any other ; a book before the authority of which the 
 bishops themselves bowed, and to which the Churches looked 
 up for advice in doubtful cases. And this book was not the 
 Bible. It was not even a canonical book, but in form a work 
 of fiction ; which purporting to have emanated from the 
 Apostles, was excluded as spurious, by most of the Fathers, 
 from the books of the New Testament. 
 
 This book was called sometimes, the *' Doctrine," more 
 generally and properly, the " Ordinances," or " Constitutions," 
 *' of the Apostles." 
 
 Whoever has read those interesting, and in many respects 
 precious relics, which we call the Apostolic Fathers, will readily 
 grant that their greatest charm consists, on the whole, in the 
 image which they exhibit of the life of the Church in the 
 interesting and important but dark age which followed tluit of 
 the Apostles of Christ. The works of the Apostolic Fathers 
 of the second century, in particular, are more eminent and 
 
396 THE APOSTOLICAL CONSTITUTIOXS : 
 
 more attractive to us as emanations and as monuments of the 
 universal life of which they give evidence, than as individual 
 productions, and as documents of individual thought, learning, 
 and po^ver. And still, when we look upon these Fathers froin 
 this point of view, we soon become aware that they, as well as 
 those of the third century, acquaint us with that universal 
 Christian life only indirectly, unconsciously, and as it were 
 accidentally, and that they all presuppose in the reader a 
 perfect knowledge of the real state of that life of the Church. 
 They are occasional Epistles, or special treatises, or apologies, 
 addressed to Jewish or Pagan opponents and adversaries. In 
 none of these forms are they intended to communicate to us 
 what every properly instructed and initiated Christian then 
 knew. On the contrai'y, all these writings presuppose more or 
 less the knowledge of what was required of a Christian man or 
 woman to know, or to confess, to pray, to do, to practise, or to 
 avoid, and what was in general the custom and order as well 
 of domestic and private as of common Christian life, both in 
 worship and in government and discipline ; and of all this very 
 little is found in the Bible. 
 
 I have already pointed out in the foregoing chapter, that it is 
 one of the divine characteristics of the Christian religion, that 
 our canonical books contain neither an order for worship nor a 
 constitution. But whoever has an eye for reality must see that 
 the Christian community could not have existed many years 
 after the death of the two great Apostles, nor have survived the 
 fall of Jerusalem and the death of St. John, had not, even then, 
 at the beginning of the second century, customs and traditional 
 rules been formed, and continued to be formed, to regulate the 
 Christian life in the different Churches, and keep up the unity 
 of the Spirit among them. I believe we know the fact, but 
 even if we did not, we might safely affirm, that the Christian 
 community could not have developed itself as it has done, and 
 have maintained its unity in the second and third centuries, 
 unless that organizing social spirit had continued, and unless 
 those customs, traditions, and regulations had, at an early 
 period, been written down and put together, more or less 
 complete, and liable to changes and additions, in the earliet:- 
 
TIIEIU CHARACTER, ORIGIN, AND IMPORTANCE. 397 
 
 and leading Churches of tlie highly civilized Hellenic and 
 Roman world, Loth in the East and the West. 
 
 The Christians of that age were scriptural, but still more 
 Apostolic and catholic. They trusted for the preservation of 
 that Apostolicity and that unity both to the Scripture and to 
 the Spirit given to the Church. But this very faith had 
 prompted them to hedge in that spiritual life and Apostolic 
 consciousness with the forms, customs, and precedents which, 
 they knew or believed, had come down to them, directly or in- 
 directly, from the Apostles. We have seen that there certainly 
 existed in the age of Hippolytus a stirring and organizing 
 episcopacy within those principal Churches, as active as any 
 ever has been, and that there was still a constitutional aristocratic 
 action in the clerical government of each Church, and even 
 a remnant of popular right in the congregation ; in short, that 
 there were in that age all the elements required to provide fur 
 the emergencies of the times. But, by the side of that, we see 
 Hippolytus point, in matters of Chnrch discipline and order, to 
 the Ecclesiastical Rules or " Definitions," as energetically and 
 authoritatively as in matters of doctrine ; that is to say, respect- 
 ing our knowledge of Father, Son, and Spirit, he points 
 invariably and exclusively to Scripture. When giving the 
 character of bishop Zephyrinus (ix. p. 284.), he says, ** the 
 man was ignorant in the ecclesiastical rules" (sxxArjTjaoTJxoj o^oi). 
 This expression, " De6nitions," had precisely the same signi- 
 fication at that time as the " Canons," or *' Rules," had 
 subsequently to the Council of Nice ; for originally the term 
 Canon was only used to denote a rule of faith, not of discipline. 
 Hippolytus, in attacking the bishop of Rome, could hardly 
 have appealed to those Principles of Ecclesiastical Law, unless 
 some of these regulations, upon which ecclesiastical discipline 
 was based, and which, as a whole, were considered of Apostolic 
 authority, had been committed to writing, and were preserved 
 in the archives of the presbytery. 
 
 But we have the same, and still more explicit, evidence from 
 Irenaeus. I allude here, in particular, to the celebrated 
 " Pfaffian Fragment" of Irenaeus, of the authenticity of which 
 no reasonable doubt can be entertained. I have discussed else- 
 
398 THE APOSTOLICAL CONSTITUTIONS: 
 
 where its merits and sense, and it is only necessary here to 
 refer to the text given in my first Appendix, and to the authors 
 there quoted. Irenneus says that those who have followed the 
 second ordinances (liuToc^sig) of the Apostles, that is to say, 
 those who have studied and who accept them *, know what the 
 Christian oiFering and sacrifice is. The most natural inter- 
 pretation of this passage seems to be, that it refers to such 
 Apostolic injunctions and ordinances as are not contained in the 
 canonical writings of the Apostles, but still were received by 
 the Church as Apostolic, and therefore must have been written 
 down in one way or another when Irenaeus wrote ; that is to 
 say, not later than the second part of the second century. 
 Indeed, the Protestant writers, who look for another inter- 
 pretation, do so merely out of that unreasonable fear of the 
 word Tradition, of which I have spoken in the first of these 
 Fragments. Certainly those ordinances existed originally as 
 verbal tradition, or at least only in records of single Churches, 
 not in a general authoritative form ; but they were observed, 
 and therefore were living practical rules, in the leading 
 Apostolic congregations, such as Jerusalem, Antioch, Alexandria, 
 Rome, and Ephesus. These Churches existed at that time 
 perfectly independent of one another, and with a considerable 
 difference as to the form both of worship and of government and 
 discipline. The well-known difference as to the celebration of 
 Easter is not the only one. But they were all united together 
 by three great points : by Scripture, by the consciousness of 
 the unity and efficacy of the Spirit, and by the brotherly com- 
 munications which passed from time to time among them. 
 
 It is to such ordinances, known and accepted in single 
 Churches, and considered by them as rules of general authority, 
 though only as to discipline, not as rules of faith, and at that 
 time not committed to writing, that Clement of Rome refers in 
 his Epistle to the Corinthians, which is not only authentic, but 
 was composed before St. John wrote his Gospel. Clement, in 
 this Epistle, speaks of regulations and arrangements of the 
 Apostles regarding the office of the Elders, and claims respect 
 
 * As to Rotlie's intovprctation, see his " Anfiinge," p. 373. 
 
THEIR CHARACTER, ORIGIN, AND IMPORTANCE. 399 
 
 for them. It requires no argument to prove that these Apostolic 
 regulations, such as, that the office of Presbyter was to be con- 
 sidered as an office for life, unless a Presbyter became super- 
 annuated or forfeited the office by misconduct, are no more 
 scriptural than infant baptism is, although they are of much 
 more ancient origin. 
 
 If Clement, therefore, claimed respect for that regulation, 
 and, as the result showed, obtained it, he appealed to the same 
 authority which Irenaeus alludes to as " second regulations ; " 
 only that Clement certainly could not refer to anything written. 
 Nothing, therefore, is more natural than what really happened. 
 The name of Clement of Rome was used as that of the author 
 of these regulations ; he having been the Apostolic man who 
 had first recorded ordinances or injunctions of the Apostles, not 
 found in Scripture, or who at least had first claimed universal 
 autiiority for them. His name, and the names of the Apostles, 
 are used as a mythical form to express an undoubted fact, 
 namely, the Apostolicity of such injunctions as to the substance. 
 The sense of the whole fiction is, that whatever in those 
 ordinances is not directly the work of the Apostles must be 
 considered as Apostolic, as coming from their disciples, who, 
 with their followers in the next generation, had continued their 
 work in the same spirit, Clement of Rome being the first and 
 most prominent among them. The consciousness of Apostolicity 
 in the second and third centuries justifies, or at least excuses 
 and explains, such a fiction, which, moreover, could deceive 
 nobody who reflected on the subject. St. Jerome has, in the 
 letter to Lucian already quoted, the following very remarkable 
 words: " I think it right briefly to admonish thee, that 
 Apostolic traditions (particularly those which do not affect the 
 faith) ought to be observed as they have been delivered, and 
 that the customs of some should not be destroyed by those of 
 others. . . . Let the people of every province stand by their 
 own, and consider the precepts of their forefathers as Apostolic 
 laws." This advice, when properly understood, is very sensible : 
 and, at all events, highly instructive as to the view of the 
 ancient Church. St. Augustin adopted the same method, 
 following an injunction of St. Ambrose. 
 
400 THE APOSTOLICAL CONSTITUTIONS: 
 
 Now the collection of these Apostolic regulations and injunc- 
 tions, insisted upon by Clement, and referred to by Irenaeus as 
 known to the Catholics and acknowledged by them in their 
 disciplinary, but still Apostolic, authority — such a book, I say, 
 next in authority to the Bible, and affording much information 
 as to the life of the ancient Church, which the Bible does not 
 and cannot give, is still in existence. It is true, the book is 
 merely mentioned by our ante-Nicene Fathers, and we have no 
 verbally accurate quotation from it in any author of the fourth 
 century, but only from the sixth downward. But still we find 
 in our present text, passages which correspond almost literally 
 with those quoted by Epiphanius. How is it then that the 
 origin of this book has never been satisfactorily explained ? and 
 that for a century and a half the book has not (so far as I know) 
 been even separately reprinted, and therefore, if ever, is only 
 read by those who have recourse to the rare and expensive col- 
 lections of the Apostolic remains ? Mainly for two reasons : 
 first, because in the seventeenth century the prejudices of all 
 parties precluded men from coming to any satisfactory solution ; 
 and, secondly, because modern criticism has been left to the 
 Germans, for whom reality has no charm. But we may add 
 two particular reasons : because we have hitherto been ac- 
 quainted with only one collection, and that the least genuine : 
 and because Hippolytus had become almost a mythical person. 
 
 We shall endeavour to establish first some fixed points, upon 
 which to found our further inquiry. 
 
 Of course, it does not follow from our having Constitutions or 
 Ordinances of the Apostles, that they are the same as those to 
 which the men of the second and third centuries refer, as will 
 soon be pointed out. Neither does it follow, that, if we find 
 corresponding passages in that collection, we possess, on the 
 whole, the same text which the writers of the fourth century 
 had before them. But it was a mistake to suppose that there 
 existed only one sacred book, which, under the name of " Doc- 
 trine," or "Ordinances," "of the Apostles," was used in 
 the Church, and was highly respected as connected with the 
 Apostles. I shall not only prove, that we have a different and 
 a less interpolated text of the so-called eighth book of our 
 
THEIR CHARACTER, ORIGIN, AND IMPORTANCE. 401 
 
 Greek Constitutions, but, besides, I hope to show the origin- 
 ality, and superior authenticity, of three other texts, one re- 
 presenting the traditions of the Church of Antioch, and two of 
 Alexandrian origin, that is to say, having authority or being 
 used in the Church of Egypt, as the other was in that of Syria. 
 Indeed, how could it be otherwise? Each of those great 
 Churches, not to say every Apostolic and influential Church, not 
 only was independent of the others, but had its own regulations 
 and forms, of discipline, especially with respect to the reception 
 and instruction of the catechumens, one of the most prominent 
 parts of the ancient discipline. The work in question was, in a 
 great measure, of local origin as to the nucleus of its contents : 
 I mean, as to those customs and regulations which were observed 
 in the Church in question. But in all it existed very early, and 
 everywhere as a fiction, so far as its composition is concerned : 
 for it professes to have been dictated by the Apostles to Cle- 
 ment. Unfortunately, the Greek text which we happen to 
 possess is dilated, patched up, and interpolated. In the first 
 six books, which form the first collection, the whole text is re- 
 written in a rhetorical style by a late compiler. Even the two 
 remaining collections, now called the seventh and eighth books, 
 are more interpolated than any others with which we are ac- 
 quainted. And we now are acquainted with three such, all 
 differing from the Greek and from one another. 
 
 But there is a collateral fact, to which justice must equally be 
 done, the concordance of these different texts, the Coptic, Abys- 
 sinian, and Syrian, in the most important articles, not only as to 
 substance, but even as to form, with the corresponding passages of 
 the nucleus of those two books, particularly the eighth. This 
 fact is irreconcilable with the assumption that the whole is a 
 work of fiction, and of a very late date, and that it represents 
 nothing but imaginary traditions invented by impostors. For, 
 however well such persons might have been acquainted with 
 ancient usages and with the writings of the old Fathers, their 
 works could never have been recommended and read so univer- 
 sally in the East, nor could they have invented forms so simple 
 and primitive. 
 
 All these distinct collections present, on the whole, the same 
 VOL. II. D D 
 
402 THE APOSTOLICAL CONSTITUTIONS: 
 
 groundwork, which was Apostolic, or supposed Apostolic, custom. 
 As to the age of the compilation, the latter part of the third 
 century is the horizon to which most of the ancient ordinances 
 have been more or less adapted : but none of these ordinances 
 reaches higher than the episcopal system, in the ecclesiastical 
 sense, introduced by St. John in Proconsular Asia (Ionia). It 
 is, therefore, not to be wondered at, that we find in none of 
 them that Apostolic regulation respecting the Elders to which 
 Clement refers. On the contrary, whereas Clement speaks of 
 an ordinance which supposes only two orders in the Church, 
 Elders, called also Overseers (Bishops), and Deacons; the 
 canons of our Constitutions already stand upon the fully deve- 
 loped ecclesiastical system, the episcopal, and threefold, instead 
 of twofold, division of clerical offices. The primitive system is, 
 indeed, implied by one or two passages, which have been over- 
 looked, where those offices are only occasionally named : but we 
 know that late in the second century many Churches were 
 governed by presbyters supported by deacons. Now, waiving 
 this difference, we may say, that the farthest horizon is through- 
 out the age posterior to Clement, who represents the end of 
 the Johannean age, or the first century. But, if we look 
 deeper, we shall find that the ordinance of the Apostles re- 
 corded by Clement is really the basis of that whole ecclesiastical 
 system. All those ordinances imply, in every canon which 
 relates to the office of bishop or presbyter, that it is for life. 
 Now, as this principle rested, not upon scriptural authority, but 
 upon the latest personal arrangements of the Apostles, and, in 
 particular, of St. Peter and St. Paul, that ordinance, appealed to 
 by Clement, presupposes again the ordinances contained in the 
 Pas oral Epistles. 
 
 From the general view here taken of the origin of the Apo- 
 stolical Constitutions, and the different stages through which 
 they passed subsequently to the publication of the Pastoral 
 Letters, the circumstance of the copy used by Epiphanius at the 
 end of the fourth century, containing a few passages now either 
 wholly expunged, or the tenor of which is of a directly opposite 
 character, although its groundwork was the same as that of our 
 Greek Constitutions, can easily be explained. We have, on the 
 
THEIR CHARACTER, ORIGIN, AND IMPORTANCE. 403 
 
 other side, as will appear hereafter, the undoubted fact, that our 
 texts contain ordinances and describe customs which we must refer 
 to an earlier period than that of Irenaeus. I think, therefore, 
 that as the name (Ordinances, Constitutions) is the same, we 
 may safely quote that celebrated passage of Irenaeus, which 
 dates from the latter part of the second century, in proof that 
 at that early time there existed in the Church a collection of 
 customs and ordinances ascribed to the Apostles. I believe we 
 may also refer to the words of Clement, as proving that such 
 customs and ordinances existed traditionally, before the end of 
 the first century. They must therefore have been acknow- 
 ledged by many, if not by all the Churches, as of substantial 
 although not scriptural authority, before the year 88, when 
 Clement died, and consequently before St. John wrote his 
 Gospel. 
 
 Now, it is self-evident, from what has been said in the first 
 part of these Fragments, that these traditional customs, ordi- 
 nances, or injunctions, which were gradually collected and com- 
 mitted to writing, must from the very first have comprized two 
 elements, the ritual and the constitutional. These two elements 
 must, at all events, have formed three chapters ; that is to say, 
 they must have treated first, on the teaching and the reception 
 of the catechumens ; secondly, on the worship and on the 
 rites ; and thirdly, on the government and the whole consti- 
 tutional discipline of the Church. A fourth chapter must also 
 have been formed before these ordinances were collected and 
 digested into a compendium of Apostolic tradition, as the legacy 
 of the Apostles. Such are the ethic precepts, containing the 
 application of the Decalogue, the Sermon on the Mount, and 
 other general oracles of Christ, as well as of the exhortations 
 and advice of the Apostles, to the domestic and social life 
 of the Christians. We find, indeed, this ethic element, in a 
 more literary, modern form, prefixed, by way of introduction, to 
 the special Canons at the beginning of each collection. The 
 same ethic and moral element appears, also, as the prominent 
 feature in popular novels and other fictions, of whicli form the 
 earliest literature of the primitive Christians consisted. These 
 books were specially intended for the catechumens, as a prepa- 
 
 1> D 2 
 
404 THE APOSTOLICAL CONSTITUTIONS: 
 
 ration for baptism : as Athanasius says expressly of the Apo- 
 stolical Constitutions themselves. 
 
 But however small the external evidence may be as to the 
 early existence, not only of the matter, but also the fictitious 
 form of the " Ordinances of the Apostles," there are two irre- 
 fragable witnesses to their existence and authority before the 
 Nicene epoch : Athanasius, who wrote from about 330 to 360 ; 
 and Epiphanius, of the early Theodosian period, whose work was 
 begun in 375. 
 
 Athanasius, in his thirty-ninth Festal Letter, after reciting 
 the canonical books received and used by the Church, gives a 
 list of such works as (he says) are not canonical, but intended 
 by the Fathers to be read by those who come to be instructed 
 in the true doctrine * : namely, the Book of Wisdom and the 
 Wisdom of Sirach, Esther, Judith, Tobit, and the so-called 
 "Doctrine of the Apostles," and " the Shepherd." Now, the 
 date of the "Shepherd, or Hennas," named after the "Doctrine 
 of the Apostles," is known. It was written by the brother of 
 bishop Pius, about 150. The author of the " Synopsis of the 
 Holy Scripture,'' in the works of Athanasius, speaking of the 
 " controverted " parts (avTjXsyojaeva) of the New Testament, which 
 are read to the people, mentions, amongst others, the " Doctrine 
 of the Apostles," and the " Clementines ; " and adds : — the 
 truer and inspired (^EOTrveuo-ra) parts of them have been tran- 
 scribed (]xeT6fpao-9»j(r«v, which means not translated simply, and 
 implies modifications as well as omissions). Eusebius had pre- 
 viously mentioned the " Doctrine of the Apostles " among the 
 spurious " books of the New Testament," together with the 
 " Revelations of St. Peter," a vision which the author of the 
 Muratorian fragment mentions as a canonical book of the Ca- 
 tholic, at least of the Roman Church, read to the people as well 
 
 * Ov Kai'ovO^ififva fiiv, nrvTrtafilva Si. Trapa twv Traripuiv avayivibaKiadai roTg 
 apTi Trpoaepxonh'eig icai fBovXofiEvotg Kari]xe'i(T9ai rov rijg a\7]9iiag Xoyor, This 
 applies to tlie Apocryphs as well as to tlie Hermas. Drey, following Cote- 
 lerius, translates it (p. 3.) : "which, by the order of the bishops, are read in 
 the churches." (See also p. 82.) As to the mention of the book of Esther, 
 it applies, of course, to the apocryphal Alexandrian "Fragments of the 
 Book of Esther." 
 
THEIR CHARACTER, ORIGIN, AND IMPORTANCE. 405 
 
 as St. John's Apocalypse ; adding, however, that some protested 
 against its being thus read (as a canonical book). 
 
 We see from these quotations that the writers of the earlier 
 part of the fourth century, such as Eusebius and Athanasius, 
 call the book in question the " Doctrine " or " the Doctrines " 
 of the Apostles, and so does the author of the " Synopsis " in 
 the works of Athanasius. It is, in itself, the most natural 
 supposition, that this " Doctrine of the Apostles " is no other 
 than the " Constitutions or Ordinances of the Apostles ; " for 
 otherwise we should know nothing of a book so highly respected 
 and so much read. But Zonaras *, in noticing the condemnation 
 of the " Apostolical Constitutions " by the Concilium Trullanum 
 of 692, expressly alludes to the " Doctrine," because he 
 mentions it when speaking of their being rejected. The title, 
 indeed, applies very well to our book, which begins and ends 
 with ethic admonitions, although it principally relates to 
 positive ordinances respecting the ritual or the discipline. The 
 reason assigned by the Council for their rejection was the 
 circumstance of the book having been interpolated by heretics 
 (Cod. 112, lis.). The later Byzantine writers, Photius at their 
 head, speak of the eight books of our " Constitutions," though 
 bearing the fictitious names of Clement and of the Apostles, yet 
 as of ancient and respectable, perhaps even orthodox productions. 
 The use of some expressions, or the absence of some theoloo^ical 
 terms, lays them under suspicion of Arianism, an unjust charge 
 brought against our " Constitutions " in common with all the 
 ante-Nicene Fathers who wrote on those subjects. 
 
 So much for the external evidence and historical probabilities. 
 But the most convincing arguments are the contents themselves. 
 As soon as we get rid of all that belongs to the bad taste of the 
 fiction, some ethic introductions and all occasional moralizing 
 conclusions, and, generally, everything manifestly rewritten 
 with literary pretension ; and lastly, as soon as we expunge 
 some interpolations of the fourth and fifth centuries, which are 
 easily discernible, we find ourselves unmistakeably in the midst 
 of the life of the Church of the second and third centuries. 
 
 * Canon 60., compared with his explanations of Canon Laodic. 60. 
 
 D D /i 
 
406 THE APOSTOLICAL CONSTITUTIONS : 
 
 We have now, I believe, the documentary proofs in our 
 hands, that the present Greek text is the least original and the 
 most dilated and interpolated of all which are preserved. The 
 two latter books, nevertheless, and they alone, contain most of 
 the original matter. In our Appendix, the curious reader will 
 find an extract of all those hitherto neglected or unknown texts, 
 and, wherever it appeared important, the very words given and 
 compared with each other. I refer in particular to the text 
 of the Coptic ordinances of the Apostles and the commentary 
 on them. 
 
 We have given, in the beginning of this volume, the genuine 
 substance of these most precious relics. Who can read them 
 without respect, and, if he have a Christian heart, without 
 emotion ? Who does not feel that they indeed deserve to be 
 placed next to the Bible? Who can doubt as to the age when 
 such customs and ordinances were formed and recorded? 
 
 After having established the fundamental points necessary 
 for forming an impartial judgment on the Apostolical Con- 
 stitutions, and having sketched out the method of research 
 which I have pursued, I shall add a few words respecting the 
 history of the criticism of this remarkable production. 
 
 The importance attributed to it by the English critics of the 
 end of the seventeenth and the beginning of the eighteenth 
 centuries, with few exceptions, and the strong and almost 
 universal belief in the antiquity and authenticity of the nucleus 
 of its contents, form the most brilliant part of English eccle- 
 siastical criticism. It is true, none of those eminent men 
 attempted to point out its natural origin and authentic elements ; 
 and their ultimate conjectures as to the former are as discordant 
 as they are unhistorical. While bishop Pearson refers the 
 origin of the Apostolical Constitutions to the Apostles or their 
 disciples, and while Grabe even calls them verbal traditions 
 written down in the beginning of the second century, bishop 
 Beveridge ascribes them to Clemens of Alexandria, supposing 
 there to have been an error in the tradition which mistook him 
 for the Roman. Such a mistake tradition could never have 
 
THEIR CHARACTER, ORIGIN, AND IMPORTANCE. 407 
 
 made, and so learned a man should never have fallen into such 
 a one himself. Archhishop Usher goes to the other extreme. 
 Exaggerating the importance of some later elements, which had 
 been foisted in, he supposes the Constitutions to have been 
 written in the sixth century : an opinion in which he is followed 
 by the German Ittig, and by Father Tillemont ; but which is 
 in opposition to all historical and internal evidence. If these 
 shrewd and learned men were hampered by their conventional 
 theological views in one way, the pious and learned Whiston 
 was driven, by his opposite predilections, into a still wider and 
 indeed absurd conjecture. He started the almost incredible 
 notion, that our Constitutions were dictated by Christ to his 
 disciples in the forty days after the resurrection. But these 
 defects, and even this eccentricity, do not diminish the merit of 
 the English school, for having deeply felt, and maintained as 
 well as they could, the character of the work, as relating to a 
 document of the ancient Church of the ante-Nicene period. 
 
 As to the research of the Protestant critical school in 
 Germany, the criticism upon these Constitutions is undoubtedly 
 its weakest part, and very naturally so. What they know how 
 to handle best is thought, the ideal part of history: what is 
 farthest from their grasp is reality. The only valuable portion 
 of the Apostolical Constitutions is their reality : the speculative 
 or ideal portion is entirely insignificant. This is the only 
 explanation of the fact of Neander having scarcely made any use 
 of the treasures contained in them ; and that while the tedious 
 novel of the Clementine fictions has been made the subject of 
 very deep (although, I am afraid, equally premature) researches 
 (by Schliemann, Hilgenfeld, Ritschl, and others), the Con- 
 stitutions have neither been reprinted nor commented upon. 
 At most they have received a look of disdain from the German 
 critics, with two honourable exceptions. Rothe, alone, has given 
 a sensible general view of the state of the question, in a note, 
 full of information and good sense, to his work on the origin of 
 the ecclesiastical constitution ; and Krabbe, as a young man, 
 instituted an inquiry into the question itself. 
 
 About the same time (1832), a German divine of the critical 
 Roman Catholic school of Germany, Von Drey, made the 
 
 I> D 4 
 
408 THE APOSTOLICAL CONSTITUTIONS. 
 
 Greek Constitutions and the Canons of the Apostles the 
 subjects of a more elaborate mvestigation, and entered very 
 deeply into the merit of these relics. He comes to the same 
 result at which Krabbe arrived — the ante-Nicene origin of the 
 book ; and, as to a part of the contents, has proved his case better 
 than Ins predecessors. But when he considers the first six 
 books to be the composition of an ancient ante-Nicene author, 
 he betrays great want of philological accuracy and critical 
 tact. Again, while acknowledging that the seventh as well as 
 eiglfth book bear a peculiar character, he fails to see that they 
 are not supplements at all, but that each of them forms a 
 separate collection, and one which, in its original parts, is as 
 genuine and primitive as the first six books are the reverse. 
 Hence arose the untenable idea, that these first six books are 
 formed on an original and regular plan, instead of being a 
 rhetoiical essay, full of interpolations, single collections con- 
 taining only a few genuine gems. The final result at which he 
 arrives, that they were intended for the catechumens, whereas 
 the seventh was reserved for the initiated, and the eighth, the 
 Pontificale (Episcopal ritual), for the priests alone, falls to the 
 ground together with the supposition from which it is obtained. 
 These fundamental defects in his researches prevent him from 
 coming to the simple historical solution. 
 
 We give this time the Greek text (old and new) in the Ana- 
 lecta, together with the analysis of the whole work, which formed 
 part of the first edition, and established the ftxct, that the first six, 
 the seventh, and the eighth books are three parallel collections, 
 and that the two latter include a nucleus manifestly dilated by 
 later additions. 
 
 But we have at this place to consider the eighth book in par- 
 ticular, because it is directly connected with the principal object 
 of our inquiry. For we find the key to its composition in a 
 lost work of Hippolytus, which, very probably with omissions, 
 and certainly with some interpolations, forms the introduction 
 of that most important part of the Greek text. Before I 
 proceed to the solution of this problem, I submit to ray readers 
 the Appendix, in which I stated the reasons for my conjecture 
 respecting the Syrian text of the first six books. 
 
CANONES ECCLESiASTICI. 409 
 
 APPENDIX 
 
 ON THE APOSTOLICAL CANONS IN THE CODEX BARBERINUS AND THE 
 PETERSBURG MS., AND ON THE DISCOVERIES AND RESEARCHES OF 
 BICKELL AND ZENKER RESPECTING THE SYRIAN TEXT OP THE 
 CONSTITUTIONS. 
 
 (Reprinted from the first edition of " Hippolytus and his Age," vol. iii. 
 pp. 173—176.) 
 
 " The celebrated MS. of the Barberini Library at Rome (N. 17.) of 
 the ninth century, written in uncial letters, to which allusion has 
 been often made in this Part, and in the Second Volume, as exhibiting 
 the most authentic text of the Greek Liturgies, contains also a frag- 
 ment of the Apostolical Canons. It begins with canon 57. of the 
 text of Cotelerius (ei nc K\j]f)iKdQ i) Xa'tKoc), fol. 536., Avith which a 
 new quaternio opens. That canon is, in the MS., the 62nd ; the 
 number is now covered by a piece of parchment ; but canon 59. of 
 Cotelerius is numbered 64., and so on to canon 75. (fol. 541.), which 
 answers here to canon 80. The 76th canon of Cotelerius (the absurd 
 Catalogue of the Canonical Books) is unknown to that MS., in which 
 the 75th canon is followed by the epilogue : ravra kuI (instead of he) 
 Trepl Kctj'drwj', &c. The various readings of the preserved text are 
 insignificant. The diiference in the numbering also is not important. 
 The Arabic and Ethiopic collections number 81. 
 
 "Fol. 548 — 550. give chapter 15. of the vulgar text of the eighth 
 book of the Apostolical Constitutions, under the title, Aiarc'iieig uyiwv 
 airo(Tr6\u)y fivcrriKtic Xarpeiag, Then follow ch. 16 — 26. (fol. .550 — 
 561.) and the title of ch. 27. : S/^wvoe rov Karayalov SiarciEig inro 
 7r6(Tij)v 6(j)eiXei j^etjOororelo-Qat tTticTKOTvoQ (see Vol. IL pp. 296, 297.). 
 As ch. 15. is the end of the Liturgy, it is clear that the MS. had 
 this whole interpolated piece. 
 
 " I owe this information to my learned friend, Professor Roestell of 
 Marburg, who in the same letter (1st March, 1852) has called my 
 attention to BickeWs Gcschichte des Kirchenrechts (L 1843). Having 
 procured this higlily interesting book from Germany, I find (March 
 19.) that Bickell (pp. 107 — 132.) has published, from a Vienna MS., 
 the Greek text of the first book of our Coptic Collection, begin- 
 ning with the Introduction, the moral precepts of which we have 
 
410 CANONES ECCLESIASTICI 
 
 given as the third chapter of the Book of the Catechumens (pp. 9 — 
 14.). We find here (p. 10. § 2.) that the concluding words, which 
 I have given with Tattam from the Coptic thus, ' for envy proceeds 
 from these,' ought to read, ' for murder proceeds from these.' 
 (^o'j'oc instead of ^dut'og.) On the whole, the two texts are not at 
 all literally identical, but sometimes the one is more explicit, 
 sometimes the other. The Introduction is followed, as in the 
 Coptic text, by the remarkable chapter on the Ecclesiastical Offices, 
 which constitute in the Text-Book (pp. 35 — 41.) the first Alex- 
 andrian set. We are enabled by the Greek text to render intel- 
 ligible the conclusion of the remarkable canon respecting the two 
 classes of Elders, which is so obscure in the Coptic. ' But if one 
 who has been admonished answers contumeliously, the elders of the 
 altar shall make common cause (with those of the left), and in 
 common council judge him as he deserveth, in order that the rest 
 may fear ; let them judge without respect of persons, that the evil may 
 not spread like gangrene, and all the people be carried away.' 
 
 " The conclusion of the next canon (in. p. 38.) likewise becomes 
 clearer by the Greek text, which, after the precept that the Reader be 
 the first in the Sunday meetings, runs thus : ' Having a good ear 
 and a good delivery, knowing that he takes the place of an evan- 
 gelist ; for he who filleth the ears of the unlearned shall be considered 
 as acceptable before God.' Finally, the interpretation which I have 
 given of that most obscure passage respecting Martha and Mary seems 
 on the whole to be confirmed by the Greek text, which is the follow- 
 ing : M.apda t'nrev' Aia. Ma/)ta'ju, uri elSet' avTi}v f-ieiBiojaav. Mapt'a 
 t'nrei'' Ovketi eyeXaira" TrpoiXeye yap ijfxiv ore tdlcaaicei', on to aaQevEQ 
 via Tov la^vpov awdljaEtai. I take these to be the words of those 
 two holy women being present at the meeting of the Apostles, as 
 they are regularly supposed to be in the Pistis Sophia. Martha 
 says : * Jesus did not allow us to stand by your side at the Last 
 Supper, because he saw that Mary smiled.' ' No,' said Mary, (like 
 Sarah) 'I did not laugh (when the Lord spoke to me, St. Luke, x. 42. ; 
 or when I waited at dinner, St. John, xii.), but what I recollect the 
 Lord to have said is this : " What is weak will be saved by what is 
 strong." ' (The weakness of woman will be saved by the strength of 
 the man, who teaches her.) I believe this tradition is meant to answer 
 the question : Why are the women excluded from the ^laKoria at the 
 communion-table, Martha having waited (pLr^KoveC) at that dinner ? 
 
 "Bickell gives also (pp. 133 — 137.) a short penitential Order, attri- 
 buted to the Apostles. It is unnecessary to add, that such penitential 
 
QUI DICUNTUll APOSTOLORUM. 411 
 
 Ordinances are posterior to our age. The curious reader will find 
 the result of the most recent German criticism on this subject of the 
 Penitential Books in the erudite and critical work of Dr. Wasser- 
 schlehen. Die Bussordnungen der abendliindischen Kirche, only just 
 published. But the greatest treasure is (pp. 148 — 159.) the account 
 of the Syrian MS. in the National Library at Paris (Cod. Or. St. 
 Germ. No. 38.). This collection, examined by Dr. Zenker, bears the 
 title t^ilaoKokia rwi' cnrocrroXwy, and exhibits, in 26 chapters, the 
 original text of those first six books of the Apostolical Constitutions. 
 Bickell considers them as extracts ; but if so, how is it to be explained 
 that on the whole they leave out exactly what I have in the Second 
 Volume (printed last year) shown to be interpolations? 
 
 " Professor Roestell having also mentioned 3Iuralt's Catalogus 
 Codicum Bibliothec£e imperialis publicce Gra^corum et Latinorum 
 (Petropoli, 1840; fasc. i.), I have discovered that MS. xv. (codex 
 membranaceus) contains, first, the books of the Greek Apostolical 
 Constitutions ; then the ordinary collection of Apostolical Canons 
 under the correct title : 
 
 "Opoi KciyoviKol Twv ay'iwv airoaroXwy ; 
 and, in the third place, a mutilated collection of the same : 
 "Erf pot Kai'oi'eg fi'r' (fol. 139^^.). 
 
 •' This collection represents, according to Muralt, the same text of 
 the 85 canons, but leaves out 39 of them ; of which omission no expla- 
 nation can be given. 
 
 " Of the primitive collection thei'e are wanting : 
 
 Can. 7—11. 13, 14. 18—20. 26, 27. 30, 31. 33, 34. 36—43. 
 
 " Of the additional collection : 
 
 Can. 58—60. 64. 70, 71. 74, 75. 81—83. 85." 
 
 "What I Lad written in March 1852 as a conjecture is now 
 esttiblislied as a fact, as the Second Volume of the Analecta 
 shows, in which the Greek text of the first books of the Con- 
 stitutions, as hitherto known, is confronted with the purer 
 text as it results from the Syrian manuscript of Paris, copied 
 by Dr. Paul Boettichcr, the editor of tlie Constitutions in that 
 Volume. My readers will find there, also, a critical account of 
 the Coptic Canons, the manuscripts of which have been col- 
 lated by Dr. Boetticher. 
 
412 
 
 II. 
 
 THE WORK OP HIPPOLYTUS ON THE GIFTS OP THE HOLT SPIRIT, AND 
 THE VESTIGES OF IT IN THE APOSTOLICAL CONSTITUTIONS. 
 
 Drey, who is very severe upon all who overlook a passage of 
 the Fathers relating to the Constitutions, asserts (p. 170.) that 
 nothing is known of the contents of the work of Hippolytus on 
 the Charismata, or Gifts of the Holy Spirit. This learned man 
 has overlooked an interesting passage of St. Jerome, which 
 evidently relates to this book, and is indeed given (although 
 imperfectly) by Fabricius. For, in the remarkable letter to 
 Lucinius, of the year 398, St. Jerome says, in answer to some 
 queries and conscientious scruples of that rather superstitious 
 and bigoted person: — "With reference to thy questions 
 respecting the Sabbath, whether one ought to fast on it; and 
 respecting the Eucharist, whether one ought to receive it daily, 
 which is said to be the practice of the Roman Church and of 
 that of Spain ; Hippolytus, a very powerful writer, has written 
 a treatise, and several other writers have excerpted opinions from 
 different authorities." * It is clear that the treatise of Hippolytus 
 is here quoted in contradistinction to those authors who had 
 cursorily recorded their different opinions upon the subject. 
 What he quotes of Hippolytus must therefore have been written 
 in a work composed expressly on this and similar subjects of 
 ecclesiastical discipline, and considered as an authority. But 
 this could only be the treatise on the Charismata. None of the 
 copious lists of his works contain anything relating to such 
 a subject. Now, there are two manuscripts, one at Oxford (in 
 the Barocci collection), and one at Vienna (Fabr. i. 245-259.), 
 
 * 0pp. eel. Vallars. Venet. t. iii. 1. p. 430. " De Sabbatho quod qu^ris 
 utrum jejunandum sit, et de Eucbnristia an accipienda quotidie, quod Ro- 
 niana ecclesia et Hispanias observave perhibentur, scripsit quidem et Hip- 
 polytus, vir dissertissimus, et carptim diversi scrij^tores ex variis auctoribus 
 edidere." 
 
HIPPOLYTUS ON THE GIFTS OF THE HOLY SPIRIT. 413 
 
 which give the text of the eighth book as part of the Constitu- 
 tions of the Apostles, but without the evident interpolations of 
 our present text, under the title : 
 
 " Ai5a<rxaX/a ^ttuvtcuvI roov dyioov 'AttocttoXwv 7r?pi 'KapicriJ.a.TWV, 
 " Doctrine of the holy Apostles on the Charismata.'' 
 The Introduction to this treatise, which perfectly agrees with 
 the text in the eighth book, is a literary composition, the style 
 of which differs equally from the rugged form of the canonical 
 ordinances, and from the moralizing style of the ethical in- 
 troductions of the first and seventh books. I have no hesitation 
 in saying that it bears on the face of it the stamp of Hippolytus, 
 both as to ideas and style. We have only to expunge the first 
 introductory period (in which also the addition to St. Mark's 
 Gospel, ch. XV., is quoted), and, in what follows, only the 
 conventional insertion of " We, the Apostles," and similar 
 phrases, required by the fiction, and what remains is original 
 and thoughtful. The leading ideas of the treatise are the 
 following : — 
 
 " The power of miracles (signs) was given to the Apostles, 
 and likewise through them to those who believed, not for the 
 advantage of the possessors of that power, but on account of the 
 unbelievers. This is the sense of the words of our Saviour : 
 * Rejoice not that the spirits obey you, but rather rejoice that 
 your names are written in heaven.' For the one is done by 
 His power, the other by our good-will and zeal, of course, as 
 far as we are assisted by Him. It is therefore not necessary 
 that all the faithful should expel demons, or resuscitate the 
 dead, or speak with tongues. Even such miracles do not always 
 work conversion, as is proved by the history of Moses, as well 
 as that of Jesus himself. 
 
 " Those, therefore, who have such gifts, must not vaunt 
 themselves over those who have not the gifts of miracles : for 
 there is no one who believes in God, through Christ, who has 
 not received a spiritual gift: it is a gift of the Holy Spirit to 
 throw off the Pagan superstitions, or the Judaic veil, and to 
 believe that the Eternal Word became incarnate, that He lived 
 as man, fulfilling all righteousness, died on the cross, rose from 
 the dead, and was taken up to God. If thou, therefore, hast 
 
414 THE WORK OF UIPPOLYTUS 
 
 received one gift, thy brother has received another ; the word 
 of wisdom or of knowledge, or the discerning of spirits, or fore- 
 knowledge of the future, or doctrine, or patience, or righteous 
 continence. When Moses wrought his miracles in Egypt, he 
 did not extol himself above his countrymen ; nor did Joshua, 
 nor Samuel, who, being a mighty prophet and high-priest, did 
 not despise David, who was alsa a prophet, and a king. Nor 
 did Elijah or Elisha or Daniel show any presumption. 
 
 " Let no one, therefore, despise a brother who does not 
 possess miraculous gifts. ' For, supposing there were no longer 
 infidels, all working of miracles would be superfluous.' More- 
 over, a captain is nothing without his army, nor a governor 
 without those who obey him. Let, therefore, no bishop extol 
 himself above deacons and presbyters, nor presbyters above the 
 people : for the whole consists of these together. Bishops and 
 presbyters are priests of some one, and tlie laymen are laymen 
 of some one : to be a Christian is in our power : to be an 
 apostle, a bishop, or the like, is not in our power, but in the 
 power of God, who bestows the gifts." 
 
 It is well here to remark, that the author means by 
 Charismata, both the gifts and the ecclesiastical offices which 
 have the promise of the Holy Spirit. This combination of 
 ideas gives us the explanation of the plan and extent of his 
 treatise, and is the real key to the connection between this book 
 and the Apostolical Constitutions. This connection is still 
 more clearly expressed in the next period, where the author 
 says, at the conclusion of the first section of his treatise: " So 
 much may be said on account of those who have been deemed 
 worthy of the gifts or offices (p(^ap(o-|aaTcov 5^ a^iw/^arwy)." 
 
 The second chapter or section begins thus: "We add this 
 consideration : not every one who prophesies is pious, nor 
 every one who expels demons holy. Balaam was a prophet: 
 Caiaphas a high-priest. A bishop, weighed down by ignorance, 
 or malice, is not a bishop, but belies his name, and is not 
 brought forward by God, but by men : exactly as an impious 
 king is no longer a king, but a tyrant. This we say, not out of 
 contempt for real prophets, but in order to repress the arrogance 
 of the overbearing. ... If, therefore, there be a man or woman 
 
ON THE GIFTS OP THE HOLY SPIRIT. 415 
 
 among you, who has any such grace in him, let him think 
 humbly of himself, that he may please God." 
 
 I believe this is language not unworthy of a holy Christian 
 Father, and entirely in character with the author of the book on 
 Antichrist, and of the courageous opponent of a tyrannical and 
 wicked or ignorant bishop, in the great work on the heresies. 
 
 Hippolytus, therefore, evidently treated in his book both of 
 the Gifts of the Holy Spirit and the Offices of the Church. 
 This second part almost necessarily brought him into the very 
 heart of the Apostolic regulations as to discipline connected 
 with worship and service, and the two points mentioned by 
 St. Jerome would very naturally come in as part of the treatise. 
 But there is also, in what follows, historical evidence, of a 
 nature not to be despised, respecting the point, that Hippolytus 
 treated in that work on the Offices of the Church. 
 
 The first chapter on Ordinances, which follows after this 
 introduction, is inscribed : 
 
 " On the Ordination (^BipoTovla), by Hippolytus." 
 
 Next follow canons and regulations on the ordination and 
 appointment to the diffiirent offices of the Church. (Ch. i. to xv.) 
 These are followed by a similar set of regulations and definitions 
 on the same subject, but quite differently worded. They are 
 attributed to "Simon the Canaanite," and are ushered in again 
 by a piece of literary composition, of a very marked canonical 
 and hierarchical character. (Ch. xvii.) It begins : 
 
 " The Bishop blesseth, and is not blessed : he ordaineth, 
 offereth and receiveth blessing from bishops, but not from pres- 
 byters. He removeth every member of the clergy, but not a 
 bishop ; for a bishop alone cannot remove a bishop. 
 
 " The Presbyter blesseth, and receiveth no blessing, except 
 from the bishop and the body of his co-presbyters : he layeth on 
 hands, but doth not ordain nor remove : but he suspendeth his 
 inferiors when they make themselves liable to such a proceeding. 
 
 " The Deacon giveth no blessing, but receiveth it from the 
 bishop and presbyter : he doth not baptize, nor make the ob- 
 lation : but, when the oblation hath been made by the bishop 
 and presbyter, he giveth it to the people, not as priest, but as 
 ministering to priests." 
 
416 THE WORK OF HIPPOLTTUS 
 
 Here we see the very origin of these Constitutions. Towards 
 the end of the ante-Nicene period, they made the old simple 
 collections of customs and regulations into a hook, by intro- 
 ducing different sets of " Coutimes " by a literary composition, 
 either of their own making (as the latter probably is), or by 
 transcribing or extracting a corresponding treatise of some 
 ancient father. Thus^ the man who compiled our seventh book 
 has, as every body now knows, extracted two chapters of the 
 ancient epistle which bears the name of Barnabas. The compiler 
 of the eighth book, or a predecessor in this sort of compilation, 
 has apparently done the same with the work of Hippolytus on 
 the Charismata. 
 
 And this latter extract must have acquired great authority : 
 for we find it in the Canons of the Church of Alexandria, pre- 
 served to us in Coptic ; a work which was only published a few 
 years ago, and which appears to me by far the most interesting 
 composition of this kind which we possess. 
 
 I have given, in the first edition, a full extract and analysis of 
 this important work, of which, it appears, no notice had hitherto 
 been taken. The translation is made from tlie edition of Arch- 
 deacon Tattam : where the original text and the sense seemed 
 to require it, I attempted such alterations as the printed Coptic 
 text suggested. The late Dr. Schwarze had, during his stay in 
 England and Paris, made considerable preparations for a more 
 critical edition, and I had learned, from the preface to a posthu- 
 mous work of that excellent scholar, that the text was ready for 
 being printed. I now express again my hope that this treasure 
 may not be withheld from the public, and may be edited without 
 delay. But, in expressing such a hope, I cannot refrain from 
 wishing that the work on the " Apostolical Constitutions " may 
 meet with a little more charity than the celebrated Coptic manu- 
 script of a Gnostic work in the British Museum, the n/o-Ti$ '^o<^ix, 
 has done at the hands of Professor Petermann. The learned editor 
 has published it without any sort of comment or explanation, 
 although it is almost unintelligible to nine tenths of the readers 
 without them ; and although its contents invite critical remarks, 
 particularly with respect to old Egyptian and Platonic specula- 
 tion. Besides this, merely to remark (as the author does) that 
 
ON THE GIFTS OF THE HOLY SPIRIT. 417 
 
 the book is supposed to be a work of Valentinus, betrays utter 
 neglect, or ignorance, of what is known respecting that great 
 man, and, what any critic who reads the book will easily find 
 out, respecting the later age and the Egyptian (probably Mar- 
 cosian) origin of that confused, although philologically and 
 historically remarkable, production. 
 
 But, to return to the " Apostolical Constitutions," we find 
 still further evidence in favour of the early and general belief in 
 a connection between parts of them and Hippolytus. Some 
 Canons of the Syrian Church, and one of the collections of the 
 Abyssinian, entirely independent of each other, are distinctly 
 attributed to Hippolytus, whose name is Semitically written 
 Abulides. • 
 
 Referring for all further details to the Analecta, I shall con- 
 clude the present research by reprinting the general results of 
 my criticism respecting both the Constitutions and the Canons 
 of the Apostles. 
 
 VOL. IT. E E 
 
418 
 
 III. 
 
 GKNERAL RESULTS RESPECTING THE APOSTOLICAL CONSTITUTIONS 
 AND CANONS. 
 
 A. General critical Results. 
 
 I THINK I have proved in my analysis, more clearly tlian has 
 been hitherto done, the ante-Nicene origiii of a book, or rather 
 books, called by an early fiction "Apostolical Constitutions," 
 and consequently the still higher antiquity of the materials, both 
 ecclesiastical and literary, which they contain. I have show^n 
 that the compilers made use of the Epistle of Barnabas, which 
 belongs to the first half of the second century ; that the eighth 
 is an extract or transcript of Hippolytus ; and that the first 
 six books are so full of phrases found in the second interpolation 
 of the Ignatian Epistles, that their last compiler, the author of 
 the present text, must either have lived soon after that interpo- 
 lation was made, or vice versa, or the interpolater and compiler 
 must have been one and the same person. This last circum- 
 stance renders it probable that at least the first six books of the 
 Greek compilation, like the Ignatian forgeries, were the produce 
 of Asia Minor. Two points are self-evident : their Oriental 
 origin, and that they neither belong to Antioch nor to Alexan- 
 dria. I suppose nobody now will trace them to Palestine. 
 
 As to the relation between the different collections of this sort, 
 which are here for the first time thoroughly sifted and com- 
 pared with each other, I have (as the Recapitulations at the end 
 of each critical chapter in the Appendix will more fully exhibit) 
 established the following ten points : 
 
 First. That the Gxeek text contains three distinct collections : 
 the first six books, the seventh, and the eighth. 
 
 Second. That the first of these collections (Books i. — vi.) was 
 entirely rewritten, and then interpolated. 
 
GENERAL CRITICAL KESULTS. 419 
 
 Third. That the interpolations, here and in the other collec- 
 tions, betray themselves in most cases, not only by their contents, 
 but also by the fact, that, when they are expunged, a natural 
 order appears in the arrangement of the ordhiances, instead of 
 the present entire want of all logical order. 
 
 Fourth. That the second Greek collection, or the seventh 
 book,-is, in its ordinances, entirely original, and is not repro- 
 duced in the other collections, which are not Greek. 
 
 Fifth. That the usual text of the eighth book of the Greek 
 Constitutions is a corrupt and interpolated recension of that con- 
 tained in the Vienna and Oxford manuscripts : exactly as stated 
 by Grabe. 
 
 Sixth. That this compilation is connected with Hippolytus, 
 both by the Introduction with which it opens, and which may 
 be considered as substantially representing part of the lost book 
 of Hippolytus, the " Apostolic Tradition respecting the Gifts of 
 the Holy Spirit," and by the wording of the chapters on the 
 Offices of the Church, and perhaps by that of others (Books iii. 
 
 -VI.). 
 
 Seventh. That the principal materials of this compilation are 
 contained in the latter portion of the collection of Apostolical 
 Ordinances used in Egypt (Books in. — vi.), and preserved to 
 us in the Coptic text. 
 
 Eighth. That the first portion of these Ordinances (Books 
 I. u.) of the Church of Alexandria represents the groundwork 
 of something very like that which the first six books of the 
 Greek Constitutions, a decidedly fraudulent imposture, the 
 forerunner of the Pseudo-Isidorian imposture of the later canon 
 law of the Church of Rome, exhibit in a thoroughly corrupted 
 and comparatively worthless text. 
 
 Ninth. That the other collection of the Church of Alexandria, 
 now preserved only in the Abyssinian text and its Arabic 
 translation, bears the same primitive character in its original 
 elements, and represents in the chapter on the admission of 
 Catechumens parts of the eighth book of our Greek Con- 
 stitutions. 
 
 Tenth. That the Syrian collection, or the collection of 
 ordinances as used in the Church of Antioch and its sister 
 
420 APOSTOLIC ORDINANCES. 
 
 Churches of the Syrian tongue, bears a similar relation to other 
 parts of the eighth book of our Greek Constitutions ; but does 
 not coincide with either of the Alexandrian collections. 
 
 We therefore have the following six independent collections 
 of ordinances : 
 
 I. Greek Constitutions. Books i. — vi. : entirely rewritten. 
 (Origin unknown : compare, as to the groundwork, 
 Coptic Collection, Books i. ii.) 
 II. „ ,, Book VII. : an interpolated Collection. 
 
 (Origin unknown : compare, as to the introduction, the 
 introduction to Coptic Collection, Book I.) 
 
 III. ,, „ Book VIII. : an interpolated Collection. 
 The purer text of this Collection is in the Vienna and 
 
 Oxford MSS., the first canons bearing the name of 
 Hippolytus. With this text part of the Coptic Col- 
 lection (Books III. IV. V. VI.) and part of the Abyssinian 
 and the S^a'ian substantially agree. 
 
 IV. Coptic Collection. Books i. ii. : the Alexandrian Ordi- 
 
 nances, Collection A. 
 V. Ethiopic Collection. 38 Canons : the Alexandrian Ordi- 
 nances, Collection B. 
 VI. Syrian Collection. The Ordinances of the Church of 
 Antioch. 
 All these collections ought to be edited together, with the 
 necessary critical Prolegomena and analytical Tables; for both 
 of which the principal points have been established in the 
 Analysis prefixed to the text given in the Analecta. The Greek 
 text of Cotelerius is so uncritical, that to print even the second 
 Vienna MS. would have been an immense improvement. 
 
 As to the Apostolical Canons, both those received by the 
 Roman Church and the others, their meaning, origin, and 
 interpolations become so clear, when considered in the light of 
 a historical criticism of the Constitutions, and in particular of 
 the collections used in Egypt, that the Table of Contents pre- 
 
 J 
 
GENERAL CRITICAL RESULTS. 421 
 
 fixed to their translation, as given in this Volume, requires no 
 comment. 
 
 B. General Results for the Philosophical History of the Aye of 
 
 Hippolytus. 
 
 I. As to the Genuineness and historical Importance of the 
 Apostolical Ordinances. 
 
 I believe I have established two leading points for fixing the 
 age and origin of the genuine elements, such as they have been 
 put together in the Book of the Church. 
 
 The first of these points is : that some of the regulations, if 
 we look to the contents themselves, are the local " coutumes " 
 of the Apostolic Church. I have no hesitation in saying, that 
 I believe some of them go back, if not to the Johannean age, at 
 all events to the one immediately succeeding, the age of Ignatius, 
 or the third Christian generation, according to the system 
 sketched out in the Fourth Letter to Archdeacon Hare. 
 
 The second point is : that they all imply a reference to the 
 period in which the Pastoral Letters were written. There we 
 have only elders (called also bishops) and deacons ; the Con- 
 stitutions stand upon the Johannean system of Asia Minor, 
 Episcopacy in the ecclesiastical sense, or the system of three 
 orders, bishops, elders, and deacons. 
 
 This fact strongly corroborates the universal evidence of the 
 ancient Church, that the Pastoral Epistles are the work of 
 St. Paul, and when combined with a rational historical criticism 
 of tlie epistles of Clement of Rome, of Ignatius, and of Polycai'p, 
 demolishes all the opposite theories. 
 
 Now these genuine elements, whether called Constitutions, 
 or Canons, never formed any real code of law, much less were 
 they the decrees of Synods or Councils. Their collections had 
 nowhere the force of law. Every ancient and great Church 
 presented modifications of the outlines and traditions here put 
 
 E E 3 
 
422 APOSTOLIC ORDINANCES. 
 
 together ; but the constitutions and practices of all Churches 
 were built upon this groundwork. So far it is highly important 
 to know which collection was used in a given leading Church, 
 such as Antioch or Alexandria. 
 
 So much as to the importance of these Regulations for the 
 understanding of the constitution, service, and life of the 
 Apostolic and the whole ante-Nicene Church. 
 
 II. As to the Canons of the Apostles, and the ante-Nicene System 
 of Church Government. 
 
 The Canon Law, which began with the Council of Nice, was 
 definitively shaped and fixed in the ninth century by the fraud 
 of the Roman Decretals. Now our Canons furnish direct, 
 positive, and irrefragable proof that this later Canon Law, the 
 law of the Church of Rome, and according to the theory of 
 some English canonists the law of the land, if not expressly 
 abrogated, is in flagrant contradiction to the documents of the 
 ancient Church. 
 
 Our Canons, as well as the Constitutions, even the most 
 recent portions of them, acknowledge no definition of the 
 Catholic Church, but that it comprises the whole body of the 
 faithful. The clergy forms a distinct order, but without having 
 any indelible character. 
 
 They know no sacrifice of the Mass ; but the symbolical 
 expression of the sacrifice of Self, a sacrifice of thankfulness, 
 represented by the Oblation, and connected with the com- 
 memoration of Christ's death. They contain no anathema against 
 reason ; but an express and solemn recognition of reason, as 
 kindred to the Logos, the Eternal Word of God. 
 
 Neither do they acknowledge any supreme hierarchical right 
 of the bishops, in the face of the rest of the Christian people. 
 The people elect the bishop ; and if, when a new congregation 
 is forming, other Churches propose a candidate, it has the right 
 of deciding whether it will accept him. There is no difiTerence 
 between " consecration " and '* ordination ; " one and the same 
 word and prayer serving both for bishop and for presbyter. 
 
GENERAL CRITICAL RESULTS. 423 
 
 The Canon T^aw of the Council of Nice, and of subsequent 
 councils in the fifth and sixth centuries, establishes the metro- 
 politan system in the ordinary sense of the word. The ante- 
 Nicerie Law represents every town, that is to say, every place 
 which is not a mere villa (an estate with peasants around it, the 
 origin of our village), as a Church presided over by a bishop 
 and a board, of elders (presbyters) ; but, at the same time, it 
 represents the bishops (not the congregations) of the smaller 
 places as clustered round the bishop of the large town or city 
 which was their natural metropolis. Those bishops formed 
 part of the Council or Presbytery of the mother-congregation 
 for all matters of common interest. In the post-Nicene system 
 the congregation is nothing, its bishop very little. The ante- 
 Nicene Canon Law is fundamentally congregational, and its 
 bishop, as such, represents the independence, and, as it were, 
 sovereignty, of the congregation. 
 
 The present Canon Law of Rome is the complete code of a 
 ruling hierarchical corporation, governing the Church by ex- 
 clusive divine right; judging according to these its by-laws, not 
 only the concerns of the sacerdotal corporation, but whatever in 
 the relations of common life is in any way connected with 
 religion, and ignoring altogether the existence of a Christian 
 state. This theory has been carried out in the Latin Church 
 with an iron consistency, and made the stronghold of a hierar- 
 chical power over mankind. Papal Rome has shown, in the 
 formation of its system, much of the spirit which so peculiarly 
 distinguished the ancient Romans in the formation of their civil 
 law. In this civil law they indeed had great men, and de- 
 veloped a true nationality, in times when all the rest of their 
 intellectual and their very national life was almost extinct, from 
 the third to the sixth century. The seeds of such a system 
 of law were sown when the Christian religion became that of 
 the empire : a long process, beginning with Constantino, and 
 terminating only under Theodosius the Great and his sons. 
 Papal Rome worked out this system in its own interest, with a 
 truly Roman spirit. 
 
 It has been demonstrated, beyond contradiction, that the 
 historical basis of the Latin Canon Law is forged. But what 
 
 £ £ 4 
 
424 APOSTOLIC ORDINANCES. 
 
 we can now prove is, that there was not only no historical 
 foundation for connecting this Canon Law with Apostolic 
 traditions and customs, but that these were in direct contradic- 
 tion to the new hierarchical despotism. Indeed, no fiction and 
 no fraud would have been necessary, if that had not been the 
 case. We are now able to discover the elements, indeed, in 
 most cases, to restore the text, of an ecclesiastical law, which 
 corresponds with what we know of the primitive state of the 
 Church in the ages immediately following that of the Apostles, 
 and to mark the gradual changes from the first half of the second 
 century, down to the age of transition, the whole of the third 
 century. The discovery of the great work of Hippolytus 
 supplies a very important link in this demonstration. 
 
425 
 
 APPENDIX ON THE CHRISTIAN SACRIFICE. 
 (Ch. V. VI VII.) 
 
 THE PRINCIPAL PASSAGES OF IREN^US ON THE 
 CHRISTIAN SACRIFICE.* 
 
 PASSAGES IN HIS GREAT WORK OF THE HERESIES, 
 
 The principal passages are found in the fourth book (c. 32 — 35. 
 p. 321—329, ed. Grabe), and in the fifth (c. 2. p. 395—400.). 
 
 From the Fourth Book. 
 
 c. 32. p. 323. Sed et suis discipulis dans consilium primitias Deo 
 offerre ex suis creaturis non quasi indigent! .... 
 
 c. 33. Quoniam ergo nomen filii proprium patris est, et in t Deo 
 omnipotenti per Jesum Christum ofFert Ecclesia. 
 
 * Compare, on this subject, R. Rotfie, " Anfiiuge der Christlichen Kirche " 
 (1837), and the recent academical Pi-ogramme of this same deep and con- 
 scientious author : " Dissertatio de Primordiis Cultus sacri Christianorum." 
 Bonnse, 1851, 4to. Also H'uffling^ " On the Doctrine of Irenjeus respecting 
 the Christian Sacrifice." 
 
 \ So it stands in the text, without any meaning. It must be corrected : 
 et in [sacrificio altaris] Deo omnipotenti per Jesum Christum offert Ecclesia, 
 as is proved by all the corresponding passages of Irenteus, and the classical 
 passage of St. Augustin (given in the Letter to Dr. Nott, Ch. VII.). The 
 following passage in Origen (c. Celsum, viii.) expresses the same idea : 
 
 Toj/ eva Qibv Kal rhv 'iva v'lhu avTov Kut Aoyov Kal UKdva tuXq Kara Svva/xiv 
 t'llxiSv iKEffiaiQ Kat a^iwfftffi at^oixiv' irpoirdyovreQ tw Qe(^ twv oXwv Tag ti'x^€ ^«« 
 row fiovoytvovg avrov, ^ irpaiTOp irpoaipepoixtv avTciQj a^iovvrtg avrov lXa<r/*oj/ 
 ovra Twv ujiapruov iiixwi> TrpoTayuyiit/ wg dpxiep'ea Tc'tf; tvxdg Kai rag ^ycriay 
 
426 APPENDIX A, I. 
 
 c. 34. p. 324. sq. Igitur Ecclesia? oblatio, quain Dominus docuit 
 offerri in universo mundo, purum sacrificium reputatum est apud 
 Deum, et acceptum est ei : non quod indigeat a nobis sacri- 
 ficium, sed quoniam is qui offert glorificatur ipse in eo quod 
 offert, si acceptetur munus ejus . . . . OfFerre igitur oportet 
 Deo primitias ejus creaturse .... ut in quibus gratus extitit 
 homo, in his gratus ei deputatus, eum qui est ab eo percipiat 
 honorem 
 
 p. 326. Igitur non sacrificia sanctificant hominem : non enim indiget 
 sacrificio Deus : sed conscientia ejus qui offert sanctificat sacri- 
 ficium, pura existens, et prasstat acceptai'e Deum quasi ab 
 amico. 
 
 p. 327. (Gr. ex Parall. Joa. Damasceni.) ITpoo-^fpo^Ej' ^£ ovrw tu 
 'idia, IjUfxeXuiQ Koivwriav kcu evutaw cnrayyiWoyTeg trapKOC ical 
 TTvivixaroc. (Corrected by Grabe : the text is : aTrayyiWovree 
 Kai 6 fioXoyov VTEQ aapKOQ Kai TryevfxaTog 'iyepaiv, an absurd 
 interpolation : the Latin interpreter has : " Offerimus autem ei 
 qufe sunt ejus, congruenter communicationem et unitatem prae- 
 dicantes carnis et spiritus.") '£le yap airo yf]g dprog TrpoaXafx- 
 €av6i^£vog T))v eiriKXrjaiy (text: tV/cXTjcrtv, corrected by Grabe: the 
 Latin interpreter has, correctly : " percipiens invocationem Dei,") 
 ovKETi Koivog tiprog £.(jt)v* aXX' ev^apidTia, ek Svo Trpayfiarcjy avv- 
 ECTTTjKvla, ETTiyeiov T£ Kai ovpavioV ovTOjg Kai ra awfxara fjfxwv fiSTa- 
 Xaji^dyovra T^g EvyapicrTiag ^tjketi EU'ai (pdapra, rfiv eXirlda rrjg Etg 
 alaivag avaaTcirrEug £)(oyra. OfFerimus autem ei non tamquam 
 indigent], sed gratias agentes dominationi ejus, et sanctificantes 
 creaturam .... Sicuti igitur non his indigens, attamen a nobis, 
 projjter nos, fieri vult, ne simus infructuosi ; ita id ipsum 
 Verbum dedit populo prcecephim faciendarum oblationum quam- 
 vis non indigeret eis, ut disceret Deo servire : sicut et ideo nos 
 qvoqiie offerre vult munus ad altare frequenter sine intermissione. 
 Est ergo altare in coelis (illuc enim preces nostrce et oblationes 
 
 * Grabe quotes, as illustrating the same view, the following passages : 
 
 Justin. Mart. I. § 86. : Ov yap ug koivov dprov ovSt koivov 7rw//a ravra 
 Xafiiavojxiv. 
 
 Cyrill. Hieros. Catech. III. : o aprog Trjg ivxapiarlag perd r»)v iTTiKX-qaiv tov 
 ayiov Trvevparog oiiic tTi c'ipTog XiTog, ciWd crw/jia Xpicrrov. 
 
 Id. ib. eadem de Cbrismate : To I'lyiov tovto pvpov ovk 'in i|/i\6i', ov5' wg av 
 eiTTOi Tig /ooij'O)', ptra tTri'/cXjjcro', «XXd XpicTTov Xdpicrpa, 
 
 Gregor. Nyssen. de Sacro Bapt., p. 801.: M)) KaTa<ppov!iaijg tov Btlov 
 XovTpou, ii>]^( wg KOIVOV cwto i^iVTiKiaijg. 
 
ON THE CHRISTIAN SACRIFICE. 427 
 
 nostroe diriguntur) et templum, quemadmodum Joannes in 
 Apocalypsi ait : " Et apertura est templum Dei et tabernaculum : 
 ecce enim," inquit, " tabernaculum Dei in quo habitabit cum 
 hominibus." 
 Grabe (to ch. 32. p. 323. sqq.) introduces this whole argumentation 
 by observations which it may not be useless to extract here, as they 
 show his scholarship and his deep feeling for the ancient Church, 
 but certainly also his one-sided historical views, arising from a total 
 want of philosophical mind. He accuses Luther and Calvin of 
 having fallen into the error of denying the sacrifice of the Eucharist, 
 because he himself is unable to distinguish between Eucharist, in the 
 proper sense, and Communion, or between activeness and recep- 
 tibility. His words are : " Certum est Irenaeum, ac omnes quorum 
 scripta habemus patres, Apostolis sive coaevos sive proximo succe- 
 dentes, S. Eucharistiam pro novae leges sacrificio habuisse, et panem 
 atque vinum tanquam sacra munera in altari Deo patri obtulisse : ante 
 consecrationem quidem, velut primitias creaturarum, in recognitionem 
 supremi ejus super universa dominii : post consecrationem vero ut 
 mysticum corpus et sanguinem Christi, ad reprassentandam cruentam 
 personalis ejus corporis et sanguinis in cruce oblationem, et beneficia 
 mortis ejus omnibus pro quibus ofFerretur impetranda." He then 
 calls upon the Protestants : " Ut Ecclesiae sanctissimas formulas 
 liturgicas, quibus dictum sacrificium Deo offertur, ab illis male e suis 
 coetibus proscriptas, in usum revocent, et hunc summum Divinae 
 Majestati honorem debito reddant." This is addressed to the Con- 
 tinental Protestants. Had Grabe forgotten that there is no essential 
 difference in the Communion Service between the English and the 
 old Lutheran liturgies, and that the Reformed Churches have the 
 mention of the spiritual saci-ifice in the liturgy as well as the English ? 
 and that neither has the Oblation ? He would have done well to 
 study the Heidelberg Catechism, the most philosophical of all popular 
 dogmatic works, as far as it bases Christian ethics entirely upon the 
 thankfulness of man towards God, and therefore on the real Christian 
 sacrifice. But of that the good man understood nothing. 
 
 From the Fifth Book. 
 
 V. 2. (Gr. ex Joa. Damasceni Parall.) 'EtteiS?) ^uA?/ alrov ia^ev 
 i:ai ha rfig KriaeivQ rptipofxtQa, Tt)y Se KTiaiv Sifdlf avror irapix^i, tov 
 ijXiov avTOV cua-t\/\wj' kciI fipiywv Kaiiwc ftovXirui, tu and tFiq 
 
428 APPENDIX A, I. 
 
 KriaecoQ irorfjpiop al^a "iZiov uifxoXoyrjars, 1^ ov to rj^irepoy hevei al^ua, 
 Kai Tov airb rrjg KTitrewQ ixprov "ihiov awfxa Zie^t^aiuxraTOy ct^' ov to. 
 fifiirepa a^^£t aw^ara. 'OTrore ovv kcu to KeKpafiivov TroTijpioy (,at 
 6 yeyoucjg cipTog iTrtStj^erai tov Xoyov tov Qeov Kai y i- 
 VETai >/ £i;^api<Tr/a a'tficiTog /cat aw fiaTog Xpicrrov (t. and 
 Rothe : £ u'x* o'^/xa XpiaTov : intp. Euch. sanguinis et corporis 
 Christi), EK TovTOJV Zk av'^ei Kai avritTTaTat ?/ TVjg crapKog rifiwv vtto- 
 GTaaiQ' TTwc deiCTiKrjp fjtrj ilvai Xeyovcri tyjv aapua Trig ^wpsag tov 
 Qeov, rJTig tort ^w)) alwyiog, Tt}v awo tov aufiaTog koX a'lfxaTog tov 
 icvpiov Tpe<l)OiJ.h'rjv kui i-uXog avrov uTrapj^ouiraj'; 
 
 Grabe compares IV. c. 57. : " Accipiens panem suum corpus esse 
 confitebatur, et temperamentum calicis suum sanguinem confirmavit." 
 He adds : " Agitur de pane et vino naturali nostrum corpus naturale 
 alentibus, non de substantia personalis Christi corporis et sanguinis.'' 
 Also Fragm. Iren. ab GEcumenio ad 1. Petr. iii. adligatum (Gi*. p. 
 469.) : " Sei'vi Christianorum qutestioni subjecti a dominis se audisse 
 dicebant : Trjv S^eiav [JLETa.Xr]\piu alfxa Kai aibi^a Eivai XpiaTOv, avTOi 
 voniaavTEg rw ovtl aifia kuI aapKa ehai. Blandina martyr tormentis 
 excruciata respondit ad htec : IIwc av tovtiov avaa-)(pivTQ ol {.irj^E tCjv 
 tipeifiivwv Kptit)V 2t iiaKrjtnv inroXavorTeg ; 
 
 ir. 
 
 THE PFAFFIAN FRAGMENT. 
 
 (Fabric. Hippolyti 0pp. pars 2da. Printed also in the Benedictine 
 edition of Irenasus. See Rothe's "Anfange," p. 316 — 374., and 
 his " Commentatio," p. 22.) 
 
 Ol Toig dEVTtpaLS rwv cnroaToXwy hiaTa^Ecri TraprjKoXovdrjKOTEg "laain, 
 TOV KvpLov viav irpocT^ophv kv ttj Kaivij hiadrjKr] KaQEaTrjKEvai 
 Kara to M.aXa^iov tov '!rpo<p{]TOv' AwTi air avaToXwv ijXiov Kai euig 
 ^va-fxuiv TO ovofid jjlov dE^o^acrTaL iv Tolg edi'Ein, Kai Iv irdvTL tottu) Bv- 
 uiaua irpoadyETai tm ovo^aTi fiov Kai Bvala Kadapd' Acnrep Kai 6 'Iwavvi/e 
 Ev r»7 a.TTOKaXvxl'Ei XiyEi' To ^vf^la.[^aTa Eitrlv al irpoaEv^al twv ayiwv, Koi 
 6 IlauXoe Trapa/caXet >/judc, TrapaffTfjcrai to. ffwyitara rjfidjy ^vaiav ^daay, 
 ayiai', EvdptffTOV r^; ©'^^ '"')'' XoyiK)))' Xarptiay i]}JLwy. Kat ttuXiV 
 
ON THE CHRISTIAN SACRIFICE. 429 
 
 'Ava<pepb)fier Bv(7tctr alyiaewc, TovriaTL Kap-Kuv ■)(ei\iu)v. Aurai uev 
 a'l irpoafopal ov Kara top vo^iov ilal, oil to •^Eipoypa^iov E^ctXf/i^ac o 
 k'vpioQ ei^ Tov jxirrov ijpKtr, aXXa kcito. irvev fxa' ty Trj'Ei/^tari yap ical 
 aXrjdeioi Bel TrpoaKvvElv tov Qiov. A ton /cat // Trpofffopa rijg ev- 
 ■)(^api(TTiag ovk 'iuTi ff a p k i k t), aXXct TryEVjiariKi] Kal tv rovra 
 Kadapa, UpoatpEpoixev yap rw 0£^ tov apTOV Ka\ to TZOTijpiov Tfjg 
 evXoyiag, ev^apiaTovvTtg uvtm otl TtJ yrj EtceXevae EK(j)vaai tovq Kapirovg 
 TOVTOvg slg Tp<j(j)))i' ij^ETEpar. Kat ki'TavQa t)}v it po cnpophv TEXiaavTEc^ 
 tKKoXovfiEv (1. tTciKaXov fiEV) TO TTi'evfjLa TO ciytoj', OTTwg cnrofjji'i] ttjv 
 •Sva lav TavTi^v, tcai tov upTOv awj-ia tov XpiaTOv Kai to TroT}ipiov to 
 aifxa TOV XptcTTOv, 'iva ol fXETaXafiovTEg tovtwv twv uvTiTVTrtxJV Trjg 
 a<pi(TEii)g TU)v anapTiwv cat rj)e ^(t>f}g alioviov Tvyo)(nv. Ol ovv TavTug 
 Tag IT poa^opag ev tyj a.rafxvi](TEL tov Kvplov iiyovTEg oh TO~tg tUv 'Iov- 
 Saiiov BoyfiatTi 'Kpo(TEp-)(ovT(u, dXXa Trreujuancwe \EiTovpyovvTEg Tijg 
 mxplac v'toi nXrjdtjffovTai. 
 
431 
 
 PREFACE 
 
 TO 
 
 THE FOURTH VOLUME OF THE FIRST EDITION 
 
 (Containing the Reliquiae Liturgica; and the Apology). 
 
 I CONCLUDE th^^ work about the anniversary of the day on which, 
 last year, I wrote the first of my Letters- to Ai'chdeacon Hare. The 
 first two Volumes, together with the Apology of Hippolytus, were 
 written and printed in the last six months of 1851 ; the third 
 and fourth in the first six months of 1852. 
 
 The Apology of Hippolytus is designed to complete the picture of 
 a man and of an age representing the beginnings of Christianity, 
 and throwing thei-efore a new light on its prospects, which are those 
 of the human race. 
 
 The second part of this Volume presents a succinct account of the 
 gradual formation of the Christian worship and rituals in the ancient 
 Church, and gives the texts of the liturgies for the fix'st time critically 
 and historically arranged. 
 
 But I cannot take leave of my readers without adding a word on 
 the Ignatian question, upon which the work of Hippolytus bears, 
 dii'ectly or indirectly, in so many respects. 
 
 I believe I have done something in this book towards bringing it 
 nearer to a complete solution. I have shown the prevalence of 
 an early systematic corruption of the ancient texts in the East by 
 the Byzantines, exactly as such a fraud was practised subsequently 
 by the Romanists in the West. I have in particular shown that the 
 text of the first six books of the Apostolic Constitutions exliibits 
 corruptions and interpolations perfectly similar to those which even 
 in Eusebius' time had made a sad twaddler out of that most energetic 
 and original martyr and Father, Ignatius, and a legend out of 
 his true history. Curiously enougli, the most striking instance 
 is here also found in a Syriac text. That separation of the original 
 contents of the first six books of the Constitutions from the later 
 interpolations, which I had endeavoured to establish by the mere 
 
432 PREFACE TO THE FOURTH VOLUME 
 
 application of sound critical principles, is confirmed by a Sjriac 
 manuscript at Paris. Finally, I have restored the historical character 
 of Ignatius of Antioch more completely than before, by showing 
 in the Introduction to the Liturgies, and in the Reliquife Liturgicae 
 themselves, that the tradition about his influence upon the formation 
 of the worship of the Church over which he presided is borne out by 
 corresponding cotemporary facts and testimonies, and by the docu- 
 ments of the Antiochene liturgy. 
 
 These circumstances may perhaps induce some German critics to 
 reconsider their doubts as to the genuineness of what we possess of 
 Ignatius, and as to the historical character of the accounts of that 
 remarkable man. 
 
 It would be useless to expect so much regard for historical criticism 
 from those who, after the Libyan discovery, have endeavoured 
 to maintain the authenticity of that product of impudent forgery 
 called the Seven Epistles of Ignatius. There are undoubtedly good 
 scholars among these men ; but they must forgive me if I say that it 
 is, even in England, an anachronism to treat the question of Ignatius 
 and his Epistles apart from collateral facts, and as if the world, since 
 the days of Pearson, had not learned anything as to primitive church 
 history and historical criticism. Their method of conducting contro- 
 versies would not be tolerated for a moment in the field of classical 
 literature, where men like Porson and Gaisford, Niebuhr and 
 Hermann, Bockh and Ritschl rule, where nothing is at stake except 
 that of which Pilate doubted the existence, and where it is considered 
 as unbecoming to seek truth, not as a judge, in order to find it, but 
 as an advocate, in order to betray it. Until they resolve to test the 
 value of the Greek text by the facts which have come to light 
 through the Libyan discovery, and by the principles of historical 
 criticism, their reasonings must remain barren and fruitless ; and 
 until they cease to make the defence of their opinions a matter 
 of faith, it will be useless to dispute with them. 
 
 I have already observed in the First Volume how unfortunate 
 those among the English anti-critics have been, who quote against 
 Cureton Professor Petermann's assumption that the Syriac text is an 
 extract from an old Syriac version, of which the Armenian text is a 
 translation. For this assumption there is no ground whatsoever. 
 The Armenian translation represents throughout the text of the 
 Greek Letters, including those which are acknowledged to be false : 
 and its various readings show the thorough corruption of our Greek 
 text. There is not the shadow of a reason to assume that the 
 
OF THE FIRST EDITION. 
 
 433 
 
 Armenian translation was made from a Syriac text, and not, like all 
 other Armenian translations of Greek fathers, from the Greek. But 
 had it been so made, the argument for or against the Seven (or 
 rather twelve) Letters would remain exactly where Professor Peter- 
 mann found it. His argument, resting upon a gratuitous assumption, 
 is so absolutely null, that it is scarcely possible to formulize it 
 seriously. On the other hand, these same critics, who are so wonder- 
 fully struck by Armenian assumptions, find no difficulty in neglecting 
 Cureton's clear and decisive arguments drawn from the character of 
 the Syriac texts, from Syrian authorities, and from Syrian pala30- 
 graphy. All these Syrian arguments are tangible points, based upon 
 reality. We find a Syriac text of a Syrian Father, evidently in use 
 in the early Syrian Church ; whereas we know nothing of the 
 Armenian translation of the later Greek text, except through an 
 avowedly careless and uncritical edition of the end of the last century. 
 That this translation often concurs with readings exhibited by 
 the Syriac text cannot in itself alone prove that it was made from 
 a Syriac original, from which the Three Letters were afterwards 
 extracted. We might as well say that the old Latin translation, as 
 exhibited in the manuscript of Caius College, was made from 
 the Syriac, because it often supposes, in the Greek original, the same 
 reading which the Syrian translator had before him. Granting, 
 however, the translation not to have been made from the interpolated 
 Greek text, but from a Syrian translation of the same (which may 
 have existed) *, why should not the genuine passages of that text 
 often come nearer to the Syriac text than to thatof the Medicean 
 manuscript ? Certainly there is no argument whatever in this 
 circumstance, however you turn it. On the contrary, a historical 
 critic will remember what Moses of Korene expressly saysf, that in 
 his youth, that is to say, in the earlier part of the fifth century, 
 a considerable number of Syrian manuscripts were brought into 
 Armenia from Syria. This is, on the whole, the earliest age in 
 which the Armenian translation could have been made : an age 
 of systematic ecclesiastical fraud, abounding in unscrupulous forgeries 
 and impudent interpolations, whereas, the classical age for Syrian 
 translations, the second and third centuries, is, comparatively speaking, 
 pure. That the diff'ei-ence between the Armenian and Syrian text, 
 is, on the whole, parallel to the difference of those two ages, is 
 
 * See Cureton, Corpus Ignat. p. 344, 345. 
 
 ■j- Moses Cliorenensis opp. interp. Levaill. ii. p. 1G5., as quoted by D. Pitra 
 himself (Prolegg. p. viii.). 
 
 VOL. II. F F 
 
434 
 
 PREFACE TO THE FOURTH VOLUME 
 
 now proved oy a fragment brought to light within the last few 
 months by the indefatigable Benedictine Father, Dom Pitra, in his 
 meritorious work, the Spicilegium Solesmense. In this collection of 
 inedited patristic remains, a fragment of Irenseus is given, first from 
 the Syriac text (communicated by Cureton to the editox*), and 
 secondly in Armenian, from an Armenian MS. copied for Dom Pilra 
 by the Mechitarists at Venice. As this beautiful fragment is also 
 intrinsically important for the theological inquiries of this work, I give 
 the two texts in the note.* Will an English critic seriously maintain 
 
 * Syrian Text. 
 
 Lex et prophetse et evangelistse 
 proclamaverunt de Cliristo, quod 
 natus est ex virgine ; et quod passus 
 est super lignum : et quod apparuit 
 e sepulchro ; et quod ascendit ad 
 coelos; et quod a Patre glorifica- 
 tus est; et quod est rex in seter- 
 num ; et quod hie est intellectus 
 perfectus, Verbum Del ; qui ante 
 lucem genitus est ; qui cum eo est 
 conditor imiversi, fictor hominis ; qui 
 est in omnibus omnia : in patriarcliis 
 patriarcha, in legibus lex, in sacerdo- 
 tibus princeps sacerdotum, in regibus 
 gubernator, in prophetis propheta, in 
 angelis angelus, in hominibus homo, 
 in patre filius, in Deo Deus, rex in 
 asternum. 
 
 II. Hie enim est qui Noemo fuit 
 nauta, et Abrahamum duxit ; qui 
 cum Isaaco ligatus est, et cum Ja- 
 cobo fuit peregrinus ; 
 
 Amienian Text. 
 
 Lex et prophets et evangelia de- 
 claraverunt Christum natum ex vir. 
 gine et in cruce passum, 
 
 et suscitatum e 
 mortuis, et in coelum elevatum et 
 glorificatum 
 
 et regnantem in sacula. 
 Ille ipse dicitur perfectus intellectus, 
 Dei verbum, quod priinitus pulchrc 
 nati hominis (fuit) conditor ; 
 
 in omni- 
 bus omnia, in patriarchis patriarcha, 
 in lege lex, in sacerdotlbus sacerdos, 
 in regibus princeps ductor, In pro- 
 phetis prophefa, in angelis angelus, 
 in hominibus homo, in patre filius, in 
 Deo Deus, rex in roternum. 
 
 II. Ipsemet direxit Noemum in 
 navi [cum Josepho venumdatns est] et 
 Abrahamum conduxit; cum Isaaco 
 ligatus, cum Jacobo peregrinavit ; 
 [cum Moyse fuit dnx et secundum popu- 
 lum legislator; in pioplietis praedicavit ; 
 de virgine incamatus, in Bethleem natus ; 
 ab Johanne susceptus et in Jordane bap- 
 tizatus ; in deserto tentatus ac domiuus 
 repertus. Ipse congregavit apostolos, et 
 coelorum regniim prtedicavit ; illuminavit 
 cfficos et suscitavit mortuos, in templo 
 visvis, a populo nee fide dignns habitus ; a 
 sacerdotlbus comprehensuset coram Herode 
 perductus ; in conspectu Pilati judicatus, 
 in corpore se manifestars, in ligno sus- 
 
OF THE FinST EDITION. 435 
 
 tliat the Sjriac text is mutilated, and the Armenian text genuine ? I 
 suppose lie will leave that rather to the good Benedictine Father. I 
 have given a still more striking instance respecting the purity 
 of Syriac texts, and the systematic interpolation of the Byzantines, in 
 my note on Dr. Zenker's discovery of the Syriac manuscript at 
 Paris, which evidently contains the genuine text of that monster of 
 Greek interpolation, called the first six books of the Constitutions. 
 
 But tliere are many other camels to be swallowed by those who 
 have set their hearts upon proving, by Pearson's arguments, that a 
 text which he never knew is not genuine. And waiving these argu- 
 ments, is it not strange that they bring forward against one of the 
 first Syriac scholars of Europe, their countryman, the name of an 
 Armenian scholar in Germany, who has in his favour neither argu- 
 ment nor personal critical authority ? The internal evidence of the 
 ease is so strong, that it is almost with a mixed feeling of pleasure and 
 of regret that I announce a fact which appears destined to put an end 
 to all dispute, as to the principal point. 
 
 It is neither accurate nor fair to speak of Cui'eton's text as being 
 founded upon "a Syrian manuscript containing other extracts," since 
 from the beginning Cureton had two manuscripts of "The Three 
 
 Fyrian Tcx Armenian Text. 
 
 pyiisus et a mortuis suscilatiis, apostolis 
 monstratiis, et ad toclos evectus ad dex- 
 teram Patris sedet, et ab eo uti mortuoruni 
 resurrectio glorilicatus ; et salus peidi- 
 toium, degentibus in tenebris lumen, et iis 
 qui nati sunt redemptio;] salvatorum 
 pastor, et ecck'siai sponsus, cherubim 
 ain-iga et exercitus dux aii^elorum ; 
 Deus ex Deo, Jesus Cliristus sal- 
 vator noster. 
 
 pastor eorum qui salvi sunt, et spon- 
 sus ecclesia; et dux cherubim, princeiis 
 exercitus angelorum ; Deus ex Deo, 
 filius ox patre, Jesus Christus rex in 
 saccula saiculorUm. Amen. 
 
 The two texts agree literally, in (ho passages common to both, with the 
 exception of the concluding words, which, therefore, according to the general 
 principles of criticism, must be considered doubtful, especially as the Syriac 
 text has here some words not found in the Armenian. But what can be 
 more awkward than the insertion of Joseph between Noah and Abraham ? 
 or the whole interpolation as to Jesus himself, which dwells on points either 
 not belonging at all to the • rgument of Irena-us, or already mentioned in 
 the fu-st part of this beautiful Ciiristology, so spontaneou?]y flowing out of 
 St. John's prologue ? 
 
 F i' 2 
 
436 PREFACE TO THE FOURTH VOLUME 
 
 Letters." The one contained all three, with the significant title al- 
 luded to : the other had (from evident want of space) only the first of 
 them (that to Polycarp), but, as it exhibited literally the same text, it 
 was necessarily a second testimony in favour of the Three against the 
 Seven, Subsequently, in the Corpus Ignatianum (p. xxxi.sqq.),Cureton 
 gave notice of a third manuscript, containing all " The Three Epistles 
 of Ignatius," with a text absolutely identical, and presenting only 
 some highly interesting various readings. Is it not difficult for un- 
 biassed critics to suppose that all the Epistles of Ignatius which we 
 find in his native country and his Church are "Extracts" made by 
 " a Monk " ? How strange to endeavour to strengthen the critical 
 weakness of this argument, or rather to justify this unwarranted as- 
 sumption, by the gratuitous (I had almost said unjustifiable, because 
 totally unsupported) conjecture that thesupposed "Monk''was a heretic, 
 who wished to deprive " the Holy Catholic Church" of one of its sup- 
 ports ! The fictitious wicked man is not charged with any interpo- 
 lation, a sin which seems to have been the monopoly of the " ortho- 
 dox" Byzantines : but he is gravely suspected of having left out what 
 a Monophysite (bishop, monk, or simple clergyman) could have no 
 more interest in omitting than a Byzantine. 
 
 But now to the fact. I am assured by unquestionable authority 
 that Colonel Rawlinson has himself seen, at Bagdad, a manuscript of 
 the New Testament in Syriac, which has "The Three Epistles of 
 Ignatius" appended to the sacred records, exactly as the Codex Alex- 
 andrinus has " The Epistles of Clemens of Rome " appended to the 
 same holy writ. I hope those who take an interest in the truth will 
 soon be enabled to gratify their curiosity by a sight of this treasure 
 in the British Museum. 
 
 Alas for the worshippers of the Pearsonian arguments, and for the 
 fiction of the garbling Monk, and for the revival of the whole con- 
 troversy of the seventeenth centui-y ! 
 
 As soon as that remarkable text shall have been collated, and the 
 result laid before the public, the time will be come for a defi- 
 nitive reconstruction of the genuine Greek text according to the 
 Syriac manuscripts, with the help, here and there, of the Armenian 
 translation. The real difficulty under which I laboured in my attempt 
 to restore it was simply, that we had then (with the exception of the 
 Epistle to Polycarp) only one imperfect Syriac manuscript ; whereas 
 now we have two, and shall soon have three complete and independent 
 manuscripts for all the three Epistles. I ought to have adhered more 
 
OF THE FIRST I<:DIT10N. 437 
 
 Strictly still to the Syriac text. I refrained from doing so, not so 
 much out of deference to the Greek, thoroughly corrupted and patched 
 up as it is, but because we had only one Syriac manuscript. A 
 difficult reading might be notliing but a blunder of the copyist. 
 Finally, we had not then the Armenian version, which evidently is to be 
 considered as an independent witness for the original readings of the 
 Greek text, so unfavourably represented hitherto by one Greek MS 
 Imperfect therefore as my attempt necessarily was to restore the true 
 reading, and to prove the completeness and show the connection of the 
 original text, I may be satisfied with the support which the third 
 Syriac MS. has since given to many of my assertions. Thus, in the 
 celebrated concluding passage of the Epistle to the Ephesians about 
 the three mysteries, the Syriac MS. discovered after my edition has 
 the very words ''and the death "(of our Lord), which I had inserted 
 in the restored text, although they were wanting in the only Syriac 
 MS. then known. 
 
 In a similar way I may congratulate myself on the support which 
 the Armenian translation (miserably garbled as it has been by the 
 unknown Constantinopolitan editor, who has not even disdained the 
 correspondence between Ignatius and the Virgin Mai-y) gives to ray 
 view of the nature of our text. For it is a new proof tliat our present 
 Greek text has gradually been more and more corrupted by the inter- 
 polators in the difficult passages ; and it confirms the readings of the 
 Syriac version in most cases where they are at variance with the text 
 of the Medicean or Colbertine MS. Indeed, the only critical import- 
 ance of the Armenian version consists in thisj that it is in so many 
 instances an independent, although an unwilling, testimony in favour 
 of the Syriac text.* 
 
 I cannot show this better to the learned reader than by giving the 
 whole genuine Ignatian Epistle to the Ephesians, the most interpo- 
 lated and undoubtedly the most difficult of the three, as much as pos- 
 sible in accordance with the present Syriac text. 
 
 This restoration is checked by the Armenian, and here and there 
 by the literal Latin translation, which is independent of the only 
 Greek MS. in which the letter has come down to us. The Epistle to 
 the Ephesians is allowed to be in each text the most difficult one, a 
 circumstance which is most unfairly passed over in silence by those 
 who charge the Syriac text with obscurity: it is besides by far the 
 most interpolated of the three genuine epistles. Let any unprejudiced 
 
 * Now printed with the otlier two Epistles in the first volume of Aiialecta. 
 
 F r 3 
 
438 PREFACE TO THE FOUKTII VOLUME 
 
 reader go through the English version which I add to the provision- 
 ally restored text, and which is as literal as possible*, and let him then 
 judge whether it is an unconnected cento of sentences extracted from 
 the Greek text. However involved the sentence of the laboured in- 
 troduction may appear, it is on the one hand perfectly intelligible, and) 
 without ceasing to be original^ reminds us, in this respect also, of the 
 scarcely less involved (and much longer) first two sentences of the 
 Pauline Epistle to the Ephesians (i. 5 — 14. i. 15 — ii. 10.). But it is 
 one which a bishop of that time, the disciple of St. John, might natu- 
 rally write on his way to the amphitheatre, in answer to the mark of 
 Christian kindness shown him by the Ephesians in sending their bishop 
 Onesimus, to express their Christian sympathy on his arrival from 
 Antioch at Smyrna. Nay, it is one of tlie most precious gems of Apo- 
 stolic Christianity, transparent in spite of its peculiarities, and worthy 
 of the man who left so indelible a memory beliind him. 
 
 I shall conclude this Preface by saying a few -words respecting 
 the uncalled-for aggressive spirit in which the editor of a reprint 
 of Pearson's " Vindicise," Archdeacon Churton, has attempted to 
 handle this question. Mr. Churton displays in his Introduction 
 a classical latin style, which in other times, perhaps, Avould have 
 stood in place of critical argument ; and he employs a facetious 
 manner, well suiting a retreat from a lost cause. As a specimen I 
 shall only allude to the advantage he takes of a manifest misprint, in 
 order to throw ridicule on an argument which he does not even 
 attempt to refute. Pearson had not disdained to supply the want of 
 any solid testimony for the Greek text of Ignatius before Eusebius by 
 some conjectures, w^hich, as he says, pleased him very much. One of 
 these is, that Theophilus, who was a successor of Ignatius towards 
 the end of tlie second century, had alluded to the celebrated passage 
 in the Epistle to the Ephesians, c. xix. The testimony would be very 
 important, if it had any existence ; but it rests upon the incredible 
 assumption of the genuineness of a Commentary upon St. Matthew, 
 bearing the name of Theophilus, under whose name there existed 
 indeed, according to Jerome, a commentary on the Gospel. Now I 
 had said that no honest critic could doubt (nor is there any one who 
 maintains a contrary opinion) that the commentary preserved to us is 
 a later imposture, not even worthy of the younger Theophilus of the 
 end of the fourth century. Bishop Fell and the Hamburgh editor of 
 
 * See first, vobuiie. 
 
OF THE FIKST EDITION. 439 
 
 Theoplnlus (1724) have indeed made it quite impossible to entertain 
 such an opinion : but the point was already established in Pearson's 
 time. How, then, could Pearson indulge in such a conjecture? 
 This (and nothing else) I had said in a note (p. 239.), with the 
 remark that I merely mentioned the circumstance in order to justify 
 my not having named that Father among tlie testimonies of the 
 second century. By an oversight, the page (printed on the other side 
 of the German Ocean) exhibits, instead of " Theoplnlus the Eldei-," 
 the words " Ilippolytus the Elder." Now what does Mr. Churton 
 do? He calls upon me emphatically to show him where Pearson 
 quotes Hippolytus as an evidence ! * He might have known that 
 Theophilus was meant ; my referring to Jerome's words allowed no 
 doubt that I alluded to Pearson's argument respecting Theophilus. 
 But he thought it good fun to amuse his readers by so cheap a joke. 
 I do not blame him for that ; it is a matter of taste : only I wonder 
 how the author of an edition of the " Viiidicife," with a Preface an^l 
 Notes, which are to be " ad modernum controversial statum accom- 
 modata;," could have omitted commenting upon Pearson's conjecture, 
 and in particular upon the note whicli proves that he knew very 
 well that the whole conjecture had no foundation whatevei-. In that 
 note Pearson mentions the doubts of Tillemont and other learned 
 critics respecting the commentary which impudently bears the name 
 of Theophilus ; and he adds : " Non tanien negandum est, scriptorem, 
 quisquis fuerit, longe Theophilo et Ilieronymo juniorera, scripta 
 priorum patrum excerpsisse, et Theophili fortasse inter alios." Thus 
 Pearson himself, whose quotation is to make Theophilus an evidence, 
 admitted that the author of a commentary quoted by him as evidence 
 of the second century, was not Theophilus, and was later even than 
 Jerome. As such reasoning seems incredible, I will give the very 
 words of Jerome. He says : " Martyr Ignatius etiam quartam 
 addidit causam, cur a desponsata conceptus sit (Jesus), ut partus, 
 inqulens, ejus celaretur diabolo, dum eum putat non de virgine, sed 
 
 * P. xi. " Venerandus noster Antistes, si Illustrem Equitem audias, 
 S. Hippolytum inter testes Ignatianos acciri voluit : quo uno exemplo actum 
 esse jam ait de fide ct cxistimationi Pearsoni. Fortasse : sed interim id 
 imum deest, ut indicet nobis Illustris Eques, quo tandem loco Pearsonus 
 Hippolytum, vclut alter iEsculapius, mutum et niortuum inter vivos ct 
 valentes ad testimonium diccndum rcsuscitaverit. Qui cnim Pearsoni Vindi- 
 cias perlegerint, negant sibi novum hunc Virbium inter testes usquam 
 obviam fuisse." 
 
440 PREFACE TO THE FOURTH VOLUME 
 
 de uxore generatum." These words prove nothing but that Jerome 
 knew that celebrated passage of Ignatius' Epistle to the Ephesians 
 which the Sjriac text acknowledges, and which Origen quotes. 
 Jerome, I am afraid, had himself never read the epistles of Ignatius ; 
 indeed Cureton has made this more than probable in his Corpus 
 Ignatianum (p. Ixvii. sq.). It is, therefore, a felicitous assumption 
 that he had transcribed this observation from an earlier commentator: 
 but this probably was Origen, whose commentaries on the Gospel he 
 had translated. We know at least this commentary, and it contains 
 the passage : whereas of Theophilus' commentary we know nothing. 
 Cotelerius' opinion, therefore, that Jerome copied the remark from 
 Origen, is the only reasonable one ; to refer it to Theophilus the 
 Elder because it is found in the commentary of an author whom 
 Pearson himself allows to have been later than Jerome even, merely 
 because that late writer might have read Theophilus, and Theophilus 
 might have said such a thing, is unworthy of a serious critic. If Mr. 
 Churton thinks differently, I am ready to give him the whole benefit 
 of the argument ; only, if he attacks my remark upon Pearson's 
 proceeding, he must not elude the discussion by availing himself of a 
 misprint. 
 
 Still, this is not what induced me to say that Pearson had acted in 
 that controversy more as an advocate, than as an impartial critic. 
 Pearson relates that Jerome mentions having read those com- 
 mentaries on the Gospel : so Jerome, indeed, does ; but (what 
 Pearson omits to say) he did not believe them to be genuine. Here are 
 his words * : " I have read under his (Theophilus') name commen- 
 taries on the Gospels and on the Proverbs of Solomon : they appear 
 to me not to agree with the elegance and the style of the works 
 named above (the lost book against Marcion, and the Treatise against 
 Autolycus)." I did not wish to enlarge more on this painful subject, 
 and therefore simply referred the reader to what is said on it in the 
 Hamburgh edition. Now tliat I am obliged to return to that note 
 in self-defence, I cannot avoid stating the case as it is : and I may 
 refer English readers to Dr. Fell's preface to Theophilus, reprinted 
 by J. C. Wolf. The alternative is simply this. The Latin com- 
 mentaries which bear the name of Theophilus are either later than 
 
 * Hieronymus De Viris illustr. : " Theophilus Legi sub nomine 
 
 ejus in Evangelium et in Proverbia Salomoiiis commentarios, qui mihi cum 
 superiorum voluuiinum eleguntia et phrasi uon videntur congruere." 
 
OF THE FIRST EDITION. 441 
 
 Jerome, passages from whose writings and those of Ambrose occur 
 in them, or they are not. The first was Pearson's own oijinion, as it 
 is, indeed, that of all critics since Tillemont : Grabe's incidental 
 treatment of this question is very unsatisfactory, comes to no conclu- 
 sion, and is justly criticised both by Wolf and the Benedictine 
 editor. On the second supposition, those commentaries are the 
 translation of the same text which Jerome read, but did not believe 
 to be genuine. In either case they cannot honestly be brought 
 forward in support of the conjectui'e that Theophilus had read the 
 Epistles of Ignatius ; much less are they an argument in favour of 
 the Greek text against the Syriac. 
 
 Nor can I allow the learned editor to misrepresent to English 
 readers the state of critical opinion in Germany respecting the 
 relation which the Syriac text bears to the Greek. Mr. Churton is 
 welcome to the obtuse argument of a reviewer who triumphantly 
 observes that Baur has not been convinced by my arguments, 
 but thinks the Syriac text as little authentic as the Greek. It 
 is, indeed, very natural that he should ; for he believes the Gospel of 
 St. John, alluded to evidently in our Epistles, to have been written 
 about seventy years after the death of Ignatius. But when Mr. 
 Churton says that Neander, in the latter part of his life, gave up the 
 Syriac text, it is first necessary to state that this great historian 
 (whom ]\Ir. Churton calls " vir in antiquitate ecclesiastica satis 
 spectatus ") never admitted the Pearsonian text, and doubted in 
 particular all that relates in the Seven Letters to the history of 
 Ignatius' death and journey, on which the whole structure of 
 these letters is built. Now his last published words on the subject 
 are in a note to his new edition of the History of the Christian 
 Church (vol. i. p. 1140.) of the year 1843, and therefore anterior to 
 Cureton's discovery. But it appears from his own and from other 
 correspondence, which lies before me, that Neander could not 
 quite make up his mind as to the genuineness of the Syriac epistles, 
 although he did not think them by any means so objectionable as the 
 Greek text. Mr. Churton has, therefore, no right to quote him on 
 the question at issue, which is this : Whether the Syriac manuscript 
 be an extract from a genuine text, or an earlier one? As to 
 the other German critics, not one believes the Pearsonian text to be 
 authentic, with the exception of some Romanist writers (of whom 
 only the Rev. Dr. Hefele merits even a mention), and perhaps 
 of Prof. Peterraann, the Armenian scholar and meritorous editor 
 
442 PREFACE TO THE FOURTH VOLUME 
 
 of the text and all its various readings. But the difference in 
 the opinions of the German critics who have treated that subject, from 
 Baur to Thiersch, is simply, that some believe with me that 
 the Syriac text has preserved the genuine writings of Ignatius, 
 ■whereas others think that even in this briefer form we have not the 
 writings of Ignatius, but a work of fiction. It must not be forgotten, 
 however, that the philological proofs of the authenticity of the Syriac 
 text, most imperfectly known to tliose who entertained doubts 
 on this subject, have been very much strengthened subsequently 
 by the manuscripts recently discovered, all exhibiting the same text? 
 and proving it to have been, at all events, not the product of 
 an obscure epitomizing Monk, but the acknowledged text of the 
 early Syrian Church. Now this Church, which is that of Antioch 
 and of Ignatius, has in other cases preserved the purer text, in 
 opposition to Byzantine and Armenian corruptions and interpo- 
 lations. 
 
 When, therefore, the editor of Pearson asserts that the present 
 state of critical opinion in Germany is best represented by what 
 Mone, a Romanist writer on medieval antiquities, whom Mr. Churton 
 quotes as the author of " a distinguished Treatise on Liturgies," has 
 asserted, I beg first to refer the reader to the fourth chapter of 
 the Reliquise Liturgica?, whicli treats on the Galilean Liturgy, that 
 he may judge for himself of the authority of this ultramontane 
 antiquarian. As to the assertion that the i-esult of modern criticism 
 has been an entire confirmation of the authority of the Seven 
 Epistles; it is difficult to decide which is more astonishing, that 
 Mr. Mone should pronounce a statement so notoriously contradicted 
 by the facts, or that the English editor of the " Vindicias " should 
 bring before the public this insignificant, and in every respect 
 unwarranted, ridiculous assertion, as representing the opinion of the 
 critics of Germany. 
 
 To conclude with a more agreeable subject, I will mention here 
 that, during the last months. Professor Jacobi has published a 
 learned and ingenious commentary on the fragments of Basilides 
 " contained in the work of Hippolytus." I am able moreover to refer 
 my readers to a new and excellent work by Prof. Hoffling of 
 Erlangen, on the doctrine of the ancient Church respecting the 
 sacrifice and worship, which unites all the special researches of 
 the learned author on this important subject. Finally, I wish to call 
 the attention of my English and German readers to the History 
 
OF THE FIRST EDITION. 443 
 
 of the Christian Church (Mercersburgh, 1851), by the Rev. Philip 
 SchafF, Professor of Divinity at Mercersburgh College, Pennsylvania. 
 This is the first learned theological work in German composed in the 
 United States, and undoubtedly the best published on the subject in 
 that country. I hail this work in both respects as the harbinger of 
 a great and glorious future. It- is worthy of a German scholar, 
 of a disciple of Neander (to whom the work is dedicated), of a citizen 
 of the United States, and of a believing and free Christian and 
 Protestant: it stands on German ground, but it is not the less 
 original lb;- that. 
 
 Carlton Terrace, August 7. 1852. 
 
 THE END OF HIPrOLYTUS AND HIS AGE. 
 
 London : 
 
 A. and G. A. Spottiswoodr, 
 
 N(."w»street-STUare. 
 
ERRATA. 
 
 Page 341. line 14. for " Poi-ta Rommin " read " Po7'tu Ifo7nano." 
 352. line 1 1, from bottom, for " captavi " read " captivi." 
 
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