which are wont to be made by such as have but a superficial acquaintance with Christian antiquity. For a superficial acquaintance, and a superficial view, will only see discrepancy, where to one who can see a little below the surface, all is unity and harmony. The rills are different, the spring one. Then, also, the points of disagreement (where there is such) are offshoots, so to speak, remotely connected with the trunk, not the main stem of doctrine or practice: or they are details, where agreement is in principle; or they are points, which have been left free for the human mind to expatiate upon, and on which no definite result has been communicated, or is to be looked for. Disagreement on such points does not affect agreement upon the others, unless there be no such thing as partial knowledge, or because "we know in part," we know nothing, and are to be sceptics, because we are not " as God." As, indeed, these notions of Christian antiquity originate in an unconscious, and may, and have ended, in a conscious, scepticism.

There is, indeed, one ground, on which people rest their despair of finding agreement in Christian antiquity, (perhaps, more truly in many cases, their hope that they may find none against themselves,) which deserves respect, for the sake of the source whence it is drawn: the descriptions of early divisions and heresies, in Holy Scripture. But the inference is founded on two mistakes; 1. The divisions were not between the recognized teachers of the Church; nor arose in misapprehensions of their doctrine; but the carnal among those who were taught, "would not endure sound doctrine;" and so "heaped to themselves" heretical "teachers." Thus Paul and Apollos taught the same doctrine; it is the rivalry of heretical teachers, which St. Paul condemns; in speaking whereof, St. Paul "transfers to himself and Apollos" what others were guilty of, that they might "learn in them,” that there was to be no private teaching or authority in the Church; no name, however high, was to be set up as being any thing individually; but all were to "speak the

same thing," as having but one Gospel to deliver, and "with one mind, one mouth, glorify God." 2. The authors of these heresies ceased to be members of the Church, "they went out from us;" so that one must not only speak of heresies, or heretical teachers "creeping into the Church,” but of their being ejected out of it. They strove to assimilate themselves to it, but they could not; the inherent vitality of the Church separated and rejected them from it; and if they still appeared on its surface, no one could any more mistake them for the Church, than in a fair human countenance they would the foul matter, which the healthy action of the body had detached from itself. Hence St. Augustine takes blame to himself, for not having been at pains to ascertain the Church's doctrine, and having carped at what, after all, were but his own notions of it. So then he might have known it, had he pleased. There was a recognized body of Catholic truth, which belonged to the Church, and which whoso willed, might know to be her's. The modern doubts as to the meaning of the Church had no place then. In truth, the existence of early heresies, so far from at all disparaging Catholic unity, the more illustrates it; there was unity within the Church, and that unity so living and so powerful, that whoso abandoned the true doctrine ceased to be a member of it; “they went out from us, because they were not of us." "The rejection of heretics," says St. Augustine', "makes the tenets of Thy Church and sound doctrine stand out more clearly." Even in a less healthy state of the Church, it becomes clear in the long run, which was of the Church, which was in the Church only; no one, for instance, would mistake Hoadley for a representative of the English Church, though the Church had not strength to cast him out, but he sat in high office within her. The waters clear as they flow on; much more then, when the primitive awe of the Church was so great, and her consciousness of the sacredness of her deposit so vivid, that

c 1 Cor. 1, 10.

Rom. 15, 6.

e Conf. vi. §. 4, 5. pp. 89, 90.

f Conf. vii. §. 25. p. 128.

they who violated it, stood convicted as offenders and aliens, and "went away ashamed."

And not only was the line thus distinctly drawn between the Church, and the heretical depravations of her doctrine, but, even within the bosom of the Church, Christian antiquity itself stamped the peculiar opinions, even of those whom in the main it honoured. We ourselves also, in that we speak familiarly of the harshness of Tertullian, the predestinarianism of St. Austin, Origen's speculativeness, Arnobius' deficient acquaintance with the Gospel he defended, are witnesses that there is a tangible distinction between Catholic truth and individual opinion. We discovered not these peculiarities for ourselves, nor that they were peculiarities; they were not discovered by any moderns, nor was it by reference to any standard of our own, that we knew them to be such; they came down to us in the stream, along with our knowledge of the writers themselves, and previous to any acquaintance of our own with them; i. e. together with the doctrines, and opinions, which are known to have been held by the Fathers of the Christian Church, there were handed down to us certain criteria, whereby to judge of them. We have not received (as many now seem to think) a confused heap of opinions, expositions, doctrines, errors, which we are to unravel as we may, but a well-ordered body of truth, digested into its several compartments, and arranged, what was accepted, what undecided, what rejected, for those who wish to see. Those who will, may indeed dispute, whether Catholic truth be indeed truth, or whether it must not first be submitted to their own private judgment, to receive its stamp, and so be received, not on its own authority, but on theirs, not because it is in itself truth, but because it appears to a given individual to be such. But they who will, will have no difficulty in ascertaining what Catholic Truth is. It is plain, well-defined, uniform, consistent.

Only we must not set up an estimate of that Truth for ourselves, and make that a criterion of it, or decide that those

things can be no portion of it, which are contrary to our own received notions. It may be, for instance, that systems of interpretation, which are now almost universally abandoned, are true, however foreign they may be to our notions, or though to us, as being foreign, they must at first needs seem fanciful. It is a vulgar and common-place prejudice, which would measure every thing by its own habits of mind, and condemn that as fanciful, to which it is unaccustomed, simply because it, confined and contracted by treading its own matterof-fact round, cannot expand itself to receive it, or has no power to assimilate it to its own previous notions, or adapt them to it. It is the same habit, which would laugh at one, who came from a foreign clime, in a garb to which a peasanteye is unwonted. "He who laughs first," says Dr. Johnson, "is the barbarian." A deeper philosophy sees harmony, where the unobservant sees only discord. There is a deep unity in Creation, though the Manichæans could resolve its phænomena, only upon the theory of two opposing principles; and that unity is not the less there though he cannot see it. There is a deep unity also in the Primitive Church, God's new Creation, although to those who reject the clue, it may become an entangled labyrinth. It were absurd for the shortsighted and unpractised to deny the existence of what themselves see not; what one of practised sight sees, is there, although such as have been inured all their lives to look on the surface of the ground close before them, see it not. The horses and chariots of fire were round about Elisha, although his servant saw them not, until, at the Prophet's prayer, "the Lord opened the eyes of the young man, and he saw" what the Seer had all along seen. The Angel of the Lord stood three times in the way to withstand Balaam, and the ass saw him, though the prophet saw not, but "smote the ass,” who saved him from being slain, until the Lord, who had "opened the mouth" of the "dumb ass, speaking with man's voice," to "forbid the madness of the prophet," "opened the eyes of 2 Kings 6, 13-17.

Balaam, and he saw the Angel of the Lord standing in the way, and his sword drawn in his hand." The voice came really from the cloud, although they who had no ears to hear," said that it thundered." Saul saw Him, Whom he was persecuting, and heard His words, although they that were with him heard only an indistinct voice, and saw a light, but they "heard not His voice," and "saw no mand:" or though Festus thought him mad for attesting what he had seen. And not in cases only of extraordinary revelations, but as an universal rule, St. Paul says, "the carnal man cannot know the things of the Spirit of God, because they are spiritually discerned," he does not simply turn away from them, but being or having become what he is, he cannot see them, because he has not the faculty whereby they are discerned. are discerned. Nor is that prayer without meaning, "Open Thou mine eyes, that I may behold wondrous things out of Thy law?" It may be then that they who mock at the spiritual interpretations of the ancient Church, do so because themselves are carnal; and it is antecedently probable, because they do mock. At any rate, we must not decide in our own cause; we may not be "our own witnesses." At the same time, in this as in other cases, a distinction must be made between the general principle, (in this instance, what would to most, as being unaccustomed to it, appear an extreme of spiritual interpretation,) and the particular applications of it. The first is Catholic, the second may frequently be individual, although in the details also there is a Catholic system, and fragments of it may frequently be traced.

The caution, however, of not confounding what is individual with what is Catholic, may be probably needed in the opposite way. The Fathers are indeed, absolutely, no terra incognita which we have to explore, no sea, to which men are committed without a compass; rather its bearings have been laid down, and its depths sounded, by our standard Anglo-Catholic divines; and what remains to be filled up, is in detail only.

d Acts 9, 7. 22, 10, 7.

9. comp. Dan.

e 1 Cor. 2, 14. f Ps. 119, 18.