one Aërius, a presbyter of Sebaste, maintained that oblations were not to be made or offered on the altar for the dead. Augustine repeats the rather stale libel that Aërius was driven into heresy by disappointment of a bishopric, to which Canon Luckock adds several indictments drawn from his avowed enemies, and unsupported by credible and unprejudiced witnesses. And yet Augustine was himself compelled, as we have seen (e.g., cf. 'De Civitate,' xxii. 10, tom. vii. 508), to protest against the too-natural construction put by those still unreclaimed from heathen custom upon the very rites which Aërius condemned, and which were construed as being, as indeed they were, paganising and superstitious. We believe, then, that this Aërius was no heretic, but rather an Apostolic Christian and an ancient reformer, like Jovinian, Vigilantius, and, in the later times of the ninth century, the great Claude of Turin, from whose teaching the torch of the ancient Vaudois Church was probably lighted. He seems to have, at least, preserved a severe and puritanic faith, and his morals, and those of his followers, must have been very distinctly unimpeachable, or we should have heard enough against them from the Catholic writers. which shows how deeply rooted the idea of human merit had become, even in the mind of the greatest doctor of grace in the Latin Church. It is sad to see how awkwardly and hesitatingly he handles the puzzling question as to how the offices of the Church can serve the dead when they must be arraigned, each one, on the ground of his own individuality; for the 'very good' (whoever they may be !), the offices of the Church are thanksgivings; for the not inordinately evil, a propitiation (!); for the very evil, either a full remission, or an alleviation of their state of damnation, or, if they cannot be these, at least some consolation for the living! Cf. Bishop Harold Browne, ('On the Articles,' p. 496,) who, after giving the various private opinions of the Christians of those days, none of which were expressed in the public intercessions for the dead, yet expresses an opinion that they were unconnected with any dogma of Purgatory. Nevertheless they were the highway to that dreadful fiction.

One remarkable limitation is, however, almost unanimously assented to by those later patristic writers, who sanction the use of prayers for the dead. Only for the faithful departed, and for the increase to them of spiritual joy and illumination only; not for any remission of purgatorial pains, or that the material or immaterial flames of purification in their 'middle home' might burn lower and less scorchingly, were such prayers allowed or justified. Before the time of St. Jerome, that great master of the art of abuse and vituperation, the patron also of superstition, and the fanatical opponent of the primitive reformers * in the Church, it is confessed that there is 'hardly anything worth recording' (these are Canon Luckock's own words) in evidence that prayers, offered for the remission of the sins of even the faithful dead, had any ecclesiastical sanction. The prayers, then, which were becoming unhappily usual for the deceased-though these were unknown to the purer ages, and to the earliest orthodox usage-were themselves scarcely more, upon the showing of those who still plead for their revival and use, than a fervent wish for their refreshment with perpetual light and peace. They were little more than the heart-cries which our bereaved hearts, who are still walking desolately upon the shore of this life, and looking across the dark water of death towards those upon the other side, must send to them in their land of life and light. And these heart-voices of passionate longing, with which we follow our dead, Heaven, which gave us our hearts and so tuned them in the rich endowment of human

* Cf. Jerome's diatribe, seasoned with his usual hot and impassioned invective, against these primitive Protestants ('Hieron.,' Op. ii., p. 83), and cf. also Milman, History of Christianity,' iii., 235, 236. There is a very distinct and ancient protest against the monachism, which St. Jerome so ardently embraced and advocated, in the curious' Epistle of Barnabas' (chap. iv.), and the very word is used, 'μǹ кal' έavτovs évôúvovtec poválɛre,' 'Patr. Apost.,' (Hinrichs, Lipsiæ,) p. 49.

affections with these qualities and powers of love, into the tender chords of natural affection, will not too harshly blame, if spontaneous and ejaculatory, and if unformulated into the imposed uses of devotion; for otherwise they will too easily become the nurses of superstition.

As for the spurious liturgies* falsely ascribed to St. Mark, St. James, and the holy Apostles, even their most ardent defenders are obliged to acknowledge the many interpolations of late date, so that impartial Romanists-Tillemont and others -have surrendered all the claim of these liturgical forms to be considered Apostolic. And if not originally Apostolic, their titles must have become a virtual forgery, and their matter, confessed even by their most enthusiastic defenders to contain, without any mark of distinction, many interpolations of far later times under this fraudulent sanction, can scarcely deserve any better recognition. It is confessed, also, that there is an entire absence of MSS.† of these

6

The Apostolical Constitutions' contain what is known as the Clementine Liturgy.' But in the grave doubt of the real date of these Constitutions, and especially of the seventh and eighth books, or of their ante-Nicene origin, no special weight can be attached to this testimony. Robertson places them at the end of Cent. iii., and in this follows Krabbe and Von Drey (i., p. 163).

There were till lately only two MSS. known as extant of the 'Liturgy of James,' with the fragments of a third. Of the two entire MSS., one is of the tenth and the other of the twelfth century, while only one of that of Mark, of the twelfth century, was known to exist. Now, however, by the enthusiasm of Dr. Swainson and his collaborateurs, other MSS. and rolls, though none of them apparently of any very ancient date, have been discovered, that at Rossano,-containing both the Liturgies of James and Mark, and which Benandot had once inspected, having been refound, while fragments of both Liturgies have been also found at the monastery of St. Salvador, in Messina, dated respectively (St. James) 960 A.D., and (St. Mark) about 200 years later; and a complete copy of St. Mark has been discovered in the Vatican, bearing the date 1207 of our era. Two MSS. from the National Library at Paris, both of the fourteenth century, have also been edited in

liturgies of any ancient date, and this it is attempted to explain from the reverence given to the formularies of the Christian ritual, which, especially in times of persecution, would, it is urged, be therefore destroyed rather than exposed to heathen outrage and irreverence. It is a more certain inference that these superstitious forms could only have been imposed, under the false sanction of Apostolic names, upon a wretchedly ignorant age, and one removed from, at least, sub-Apostolic times by a long interval.

Bishop Lightfoot, than whom no more impartial or learned theologian has in these times adorned the Church of England, distinctly gives up their Apostolic origin when he says: If, therefore, there be any first or second century nucleus in the existing liturgies,' etc. ('Ep. of Clement,' i. 388, n.).

We have said that the evidence of these liturgies is invalidated by the undoubted marks of their late and spurious origin, at any rate, in the form in which we have them, their Apostolic titles being thus proved, by necessary implication, as false in fact, if not forged. The first internal evidence is the occurrence of such theological terms as are Dr. Swainson's excellent edition (Cambridge, 1884), one of which bears a suspicious resemblance to the text generally received of St. James. The first mention of the Liturgy ascribed to St. James is in a canon of the Council of Trullo (A.D. 692), and of St. Mark in the eleventh or twelfth century.-Swainson, p. xxix.

* Arnobius has indeed said ('Adv. Gentes,' iv. 36), and his treatise was written evidently during the persecution under Diocletian about 303-5: 'Why have our writings deserved to be given to the flames? Our meetings to be cruelly broken up, in which prayer is made to the supreme God, peace and pardon are asked for all in authority, for soldiers, kings, friends, enemies, for those still in life, and those freed from the bondage of the flesh? But it will be noticed that this testimony is only just pre-Nicene, nor is his style of writing indicative of clear theological or Scriptural accuracy. It is at times exaggerated and fanciful. Cf. his account of the Passion.-' Adv. Gentes,' i. 53.

only found in general use in the ecclesiastical writings of the post-Nicene period. We may not be able definitely to prove this of the term 'consubstantial,' which occurs not only in the prayer to the Eternal Son (as in the 'Prayer of Inclination, and immediately before the τὰ ἅγια τοῖς ἁγίοις, 'Divine Liturgy of Mark '*), but in the invocation also of the Blessed Spirit ('Prayer for the Change of the Elements,' 'Divine Liturgy of James'), and in that even of the whole Trinity, (ὁμοούσιον Τριάδα, both in a prayer said before the elevation of the gifts and in the 'Antidoron' ('Liturgy of James't). For it is distinctly averred by Eusebius that this term, the great polemical definition of Nicea, had been used in times more ancient than his own, and St. Athanasius ('Ad Afros.,' vi.) speaks in his days of 'the testimony of ancient bishops' as having been given to it 'about one hundred and thirty years since.' But we can rely more definitely upon another theological term, which must disprove decisively the Apostolic authorship of these liturgies—the name given often in them to the Virgin, and famous in the Nestorian controversy, Theotokos,' or 'Mother of God.' Though the ecclesiastical historian, Socrates, says that Origen had commented upon this word, and although it is found in the immediately pre-Nicene writings of Peter of Alexandria (Ex Chronico Pasch. in Galland.), yet there is no very conclusive evidence beyond a general statement in Theodoret,|| that it was in any customary use in the Church

* Swainson, 'Greek Liturgies,' p. 66. † Swainson, pp. 324, 325. 'Letter of Eusebius of Cesarea.' Cf. Socrates, 'Eccl. Hist.,' i. 8, p. 34, and St. Athan., Treatises against Arianism' (Oxford), i., pp. 35, n. and 64, n.

§ The sacred homily, ‘On the Annunciation,' ascribed to Gregory Thaumaturgus, contains the term, but these homilies present certain evidences of their spurious character. Mosheim, 'Eccl. Hist.,' i. 235.

|| Cf. the notes to the same Oxford edition of the Treatises of Athanasius,' ii. 420.