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and bishops. Laws and articles of faith, of universal obligation, are issued only by the whole Church, concentrated and represented at an Ecumenical Council.

§ VI.-The Teaching of the Fathers.

What has now become a rule in dogmatic works—to give a separate "treatise" or "locus" to the Popecame in with Aquinas, the first theologian who, on grounds to be explained presently, made the doctrine of the Pope a formal part of dogmatic theology, i.e., of the Scholastic, and it thus dates from 1274. Since then every doctrinal treatise has its section on the "Primacy," and since Melchior Canus (about 1550) more especially, but in a shorter form with Aquinas, a discussion of the Pope's authority in matters of faith. With the Jesuit theologians (compare, e.g., among living writers, Passaglia, Schrader, Weninger, etc.), the monarchical authority and magisterial power of the Pope is the chief article on which all the rest depends, and which comes before all in weight and fundamental significance. And rightly so, if the Pope is infallible in his decisions; for then every authority in the Church, that of Councils included, is a mere derivation from his, and all certainty of faith rests ultimately on

him and his divine prerogative of being the vehicle of a permanent Divine inspiration. Every Christian must say: "I believe this or that article of faith, because I believe in the Pope's infallibility, and because the Pope has decided it, or has ratified the decision and teaching of others."

And now compare with this the silence of the ancient Church. In the first three centuries, St. Irenæus is the only writer who connects the superiority of the Roman Church with doctrine; but he places this superiority, rightly understood, only in its antiquity, its double apostolical origin, and in the circumstance of the pure tradition being guarded and maintained there through the constant concourse of the faithful from all countries. Tertullian, Cyprian,1 Lactantius, know nothing of special Papal prerogative, or of any higher or supreme right of deciding in matter of doctrine. In the writings of the Greek doctors, Eusebius, St. Athanasius, St. Basil the Great, the two Gregories,

1 On the famous interpolation in Cyprian's De Unit. Eccles. see later. 2 St. Basil (Opp. ed. Bened. iii. 301, Epp. 239 and 214) has expressed most strongly his contempt for the writings of the Popes, "those insolent and puffed up Occidentals, who would only sanction false doctrine." He says he would not receive their letters if they fell from heaven. He was provoked by the support given at Rome to the open Sabellianism of Marcellus and the unsettling of the Antiochene Church.

and St. Epiphanius, there is not one word of any prerogatives of the Roman bishop. The most copious of the Greek Fathers, St. Chrysostom, is wholly silent on the subject, and so are the two Cyrils; equally silent are the Latins, Hilary, Pacian, Zeno, Lucifer, Sulpicius, and St. Ambrose. Even the Roman writer Ursinus (about 440), in defending the Roman view of re-baptism, avoids-perhaps cannot venture upon any appeal to -the authority of the Roman Church, as final, or even of especial weight !1

St. Augustine has written more on the Church, its unity and authority, than all the other Fathers put together. Yet, from all his numerous works, filling ten folios, only one sentence, in one letter, can be quoted, where he says that the principality of the Apostolic Chair has always been in Rome,2-which could, of course, be said then with equal truth of Antioch, Jerusalem, and Alexandria. Any reader of his Pastoral Letter to the separated Donatists on the Unity of the Church, must find it inexplicable, on the Jesuit theory, that in these seventy-five chapters there is not a single

1 That he is the author is clear from the all but contemporary statement of Gennadius, and the oldest Ms. See Bennettis, Privilegia R. P. Vindicata (Romæ, 1756), ii. 274.

2 Ep. 43, Opp. (Antwerp), ii. 69.

word on the necessity of communion with Rome as the centre of unity. He urges all sorts of arguments to show that the Donatists are bound to return to the Church, but of the Papal Chair, as one of them, he knows nothing. So again with the famous Commonitorium of St. Vincent of Lerins, composed in 434. If the view of Roman infallibility had existed anywhere in the Church at that time, it could not have been possibly passed over in a book exclusively concerned with the question of the means for ascertaining the genuine Christian doctrine. But the author keeps to the three notes of universality, permanence, and consent, and to the Ecumenical Councils. Even Pope Pelagius I. praises St. Augustine for "being mindful of the divine doctrine which places the foundation of the Church in the Apostolical Sees, and teaching that they are schismatics who separate themselves from the communion of these Apostolical Sees." This Pope (555560), then, knows nothing of any exclusive teaching privilege of Rome, but only of the necessity of adhering in disputed questions of faith to the Apostolical Churches-Alexandria, Antioch, and Jerusalem, as well

as Rome.2

1 Mansi, Concil. ix. 716.

s Ib, ix. 732.

Moreover, we have writings or statements about the ranks of the hierarchy in the ancient Church, and the Papal dignity is never named as one of them, or mentioned as anything existing apart in the Church. In the writings of the Areopagite, composed at the end of the fifth century, on the hierarchy, only bishops, presbyters, and deacons are mentioned. In 631, the famous Spanish theologian, Isidore of Seville, describes all the grades of the hierarchy, and divides bishops into four ranksPatriarchs, Archbishops, Metropolitans, and Bishops. Gratian incorporated this long chapter from Isidore into his Decretum, strange as it must have appeared to him that the first and highest office should not be named at all. As late as 789 the Spanish Abbot Beatus gives the same account; he too knows no higher office in the Church than Patriarchs, of whom he calls the Roman the first.1

There is another fact the infallibilist will find it impossible to explain. We have a copious literature on the Christian sects and heresies of the first six centuries,—Irenæus, Hippolytus, Epiphanius, Philastrius, St. Augustine, and, later, Leontius and Timotheus, have left us accounts of them to the number of eighty, but 1 Beati Comment. in Apoc. (Madr. 1776), p. 99.

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