some of them are momentous,) in which a principle or practice obscurely or doubtfully produced in the canonical Scriptures, receives illustration (sometimes determinatively so) from the otherwise recorded faith and practice of the early church. In such instances we are saved from the danger of attributing any "joint authority" to the uninspired ecclesiastical documents, by the simple circumstance (if we are indeed willing to regard it) that the illustrative evidence we are in search of is often derivable, in equal force, from pagan or heretical, as from christian and orthodox writings. Thus-and the one example may suffice-Pliny's letter to Trajan contains incidental evidence, nearly decisive, in relation to two or three points of apostolic, or very early discipline. This letter then enters among the materials of church history; and, so far as it goes, it enables us, with more satisfaction than otherwise we could enjoy, to determine what is but ambiguously expressed in Scripture. The private and unlearned Christian may rejoice to have this heathen authority laid before him, as a confirmation of his practice in certain instances ;—and yet he adheres to such practices on the sole authority of Scripture. In search of this kind of satisfaction, we read either Pliny or Justin Martyr, simply to ascertain some fact by the aid of their collated testimony.

The often mentioned instances of episcopacy and infant baptism come under this same head. What the apostles did and enjoined, as to church government, is a question which labours under some difficulty, if we look no further than to their extant writings. It becomes inevitable then that, on these points of history, we should seek information wherever we can find it. If a lost treatise of Seneca or Plutarch were at this moment to be produced from a Herculaneum, containing some incidental reference to the usages of the first Christians, there would undoubtedly be a rush of all parties toward the crumbling document. Yet whatever might be the argumentative product of this new evidence, those who might be the gainers by it, would surely know how to preserve their religious sentiments free from any religious deference toward Plutarch or Seneca. This mischievous confusion among our religious feelings, takes place only when it happens to be from the pages of christian antiquity that we derive

our incidental information, bearing upon doubtful apostolic practices.

Let it be supposed that every page of ancient christian literature had long ago perished, and that, in illustration of the meaning of the apostolic writings, we were compelled to turn, as our only resource, to the heathen writers of the same period. In that case the use to be made of such illustrative evidence would stand clear of all ambiguity-it is illustration, and nothing more, of the canonical document, to which alone any authoritative value attaches. As to unlearned readers of the Bible, in such a case they would listen to this foreign evidence, and assign to it more or less value; but it would share no particle of their religious deference and if any despotic endeavour were made to overrule private judgment on the pretext of the incompetency of the unlearned to appreciate this extra christian evidence, it might at once be repelled on the plea that, whatever in Scripture is too obscure to be understood without the aid of pagan testimony, should not be ecclesiastically enacted, or enforced, in a manner which, confessedly, would not be warrantable apart from that testimony. We must not impose upon Christians, on the authority of Pliny, that which the unelucidated authority of Peter could not be shown to enjoin.

On the other side, our present argument must be kept clear from any entanglement with the THEORY hereafter to be considered, and which supposes a legislative authority to reside, from age to age, in the heads of the visible church-an authority tantamount to Scripture. This Theory is the distinction of the modern Romish church.

As an instance illustrative of the practical difference between the hypothesis and the theory, we may name-communion in one kind. It is acknowledged that the church has denied the cup to the laity by her sovereign authority, exercised in a late age. And in like manner the universal celibacy of the clergy, and the prohibition of the Scriptures to the people, and the celebration of worship in an unknown tongue, and the nundination of indulgences, and the cecumenic authority of the pope :-these things, which are the characteristics of popery, can be defended only on the basis of the Theory of a permanent and miraculously attested power to

legislate, irrespectively of the Canonical Scriptures. As to the excellence and merit of the ascetic life, as to the reverence due to images, and to the relics of the saints, as to the invocation of the saints, and specially of the Virgin-as to the purgatorial and expiatory fire, as to the efficacy of prayers for the dead, as to the doctrine of sacramental efficacy, and a belief concerning the eucharistic rite identical in popular apprehension with the doctrine of transubstantiation, as to the illimitable and irresponsible power of the clergy, as to the efficacy of penance;-these things, and others of the same quality, they were inherited by Rome from a high antiquity, and therefore they are all saved by the hypothesis which we are now to examine. These things are all involved in "Catholic Truth:"-these things claim veneration as being of undefined antiquity; and unless a way of escape from the hypothesis before us can be discovered, to these articles of belief, and to these practices, the protestant church, in that case confessing the presumption of its reformers, ought to

return.

It is surely reasonable to admit the probable supposition that many things, whether of belief on extrinsic subjects, or of discipline, were orally conveyed to the first converts, of which no trace (or none but the most obscure) is discoverable in the canonical Scriptures. So far therefore the hypothesis in question starts from a point historically good. An à priori argument recommends it to our acceptance; and if it were possible to distinguish, without a shadow of doubt, the fragmenta apostolica, as they lie scattered on the field of antiquity, then only one point more would need to be supplied, in bringing these particles to their places in the body of Revelation. This one point is however essential, and it is nothing less than some apostolic mandate, saying," These things, do and teach." Such an injunction wanting, then these fragments, even if they were recovered, could never be brought home to the consciences of Christians, as of perpetual obligation. For as, on the one hand, nothing is more probable than that our Lord and his apostles should have left with their immediate hearers many things not afterwards consigned to writing; so is it equally probable that these unrecorded mandates, or revelations, should have been intended to subserve some temporary

purpose only. In this case the recovery of them, even could it be effected, would perplex more than edify the modern church.

But is it possible (if it were desirable) to discover these fragments, and to discriminate them? This question will be best answered by bringing it to the test of some definite instance. We must however keep in view the conditions, hard as they are, under which any attempt must be made to reinstate the (supposed) remains of apostolic teaching, as conveyed by the extant literature of the early church. Every thing depends upon a knowledge of the facts in this case.

On any occasion in which we were labouring to bring together and to restore the scattered rudiments of a remotely established scheme of government, or system of belief, it is clear that the value of the information we were seeking would be directly as the antiquity of the document; or, otherwise stated, inversely as these documents are more recent. Recorded usages or opinions, authentic and available only so far as they may be relied upon as genuine, must be derived with a constantly diminishing certainty or satisfaction from later sources. The reason of this plain rule of historical inquiry is obvious. What later writers have repeated as ancient and genuine, may, in fact, have become much adulterated; or may be altogether supposititious.

In any instance analogous to the one now before us, to reject the more ancient evidences as insufficient, and to accept the more recent, would be a mode of procedure directly at variance with the reason of the case, and therefore not to be allowed, unless warranted by some circumstances altogether peculiar and peremptory. Writers occupying a position four hundred years down. the stream of time, from the spring-head, may be supposed (let it be granted as possible) to convey some genuine particles of the original tradition, which had been altogether overlooked by their predecessors but that we can hardly be too cautious or sceptical in admitting this sort of late testimony, is manifest.

The facts of the case, then, with which we are now concerned are these:-We are in search of GENUINE APOSTOLIC TRADITIONS; and with this view we naturally look, in the first instance, to the christian literature of the age next to that of the apostles. But the scanty (not to say vapid) writings of that age, few as they are,

and liable too to sweeping critical surmises, are found to be altogether insufficient for sustaining the platform of "catholic truth," as now attempted to be restored, after the model of the fourth century. That very part of the field of antiquity on which we ought to glean the fragments we are in search of, most abundantly, affords barely a few atoms of the kind. Even a clear testimony to the first principles of the Gospel, is with some difficulty extorted from these ancient Reliquiæ; and we are driven to put a charitable construction upon a few ambiguous phrases, before we can affirm some of these earliest writers to have been sound, as to the prime elements of a christian belief. We float down the stream of time as far as to the commencement of the third century before our materials become at all copious, and before the more characteristic articles of "catholic truth" make their appearance with any distinctness. The writings of Tertullian, Cyprian, and Origen, comprise very nearly all we can now know of the opinions and practices of an age which itself was remote enough from the times of the apostles to have given scope to extensive corruptions of faith and doctrine.*

Let the rule of analogy be applied to this critical instance.All protestants allow that gross superstitions prevailed in the church in the age of Gregory I.; but the modern advocates of

From Minutius Felix, Dionysius of Alexandria, Gregory Thaumaturgus, and Arnobius, with whatever fragments of the same period may have come down to us, extremely little is to be gathered touching the points now in view. It is not without the aid of the Fathers of the fourth century, that church principles can be established. This should be distinctly understood. To these writers the appeal is formally made;-the authority of a higher antiquity is indeed gladly accepted, so far as it goes; but the stand must be made in the Nicene age. One of the most recent, as well as specious publications of the Tractarian school, distinctly and repeatedly admits that catholic truth is now about 1500 years old, and dates from a time when the church was blessed with "wiser men than you, or any of us (videlicet—‘us,' Oxford Tract Writers) in the nineteenth century." These "great and good men," living "fifteen hundred years ago," are those to whose "testimony in the present day we must look back, through the long mist of years, whenever we want to know what is good and evil-what will make us happy," &c.-Sewell's Christian Morals: chap. I, II, III. This ingenious writer very properly, in sending the youth of England to school with the authors of "Fables and lying wonders," lays it down as an axiom that "doubt is a sin," and that "it is better to have the mind filled with innocent fairy tales, and visions of the fancy, than to keep it empty, and cold, and lonely, without an occupant.”—P. 11.