study of the selected patristical treatises lately printed, or reprinted, in English translations, there has been a vexatious feeling of disappointment; for the Fathers have not proved to be what they expected; while on the other hand, in order to shew the hollowness of the inflated panegyrics, several publications have been issued, in which many of the faults, follies, and mistakes, of those devout and venerable, though fallible, men have been collected and exhibited to the public gaze in their unveiled deformity. Scholars knew the facts; and could make ample allowance for the defects of the Fathers, in consideration of the Pagan education of many of them; the ignorance and prejudices of the age in which they lived, and of which they partook; the spirit of superstition and mysticism which soon began to overrun the visible church; and other circumstances; but not so the mass of readers, who are surprised to find in their writings many things so fanciful, puerile, absurd, or unscriptural, that a Sunday-school child in these our degenerate days would be ashamed of them. Thus they are being tried by an unfair standard, and are losing ground in public estimation, because men look for what it is unreasonable to expect. We would recommend, therefore, both to their fautors and their calumniators, if they have not time and ability to wade through a fair portion-say a hundred Greek and Latin folios

of their writings, in order to form an original estimate, to peruse at least such a treatise as that of M. Daillé, from which they will gather some notable matters which enter into the argument. Daillé has the name of being very harsh in his conclusions respecting these holy men; and certain it is, that the chief

-

object of his treatise being to shew their imperfections and mistakes, in reply to those who make them authoritative arbiters of faith, the picture is far less bright than it would have been, had he been selecting their beauties and excellences. But it is not true that he is a mere scavenger of faults; his object is far larger and more edifying. He undertakes to shew as follows:-that it is difficult, if not impracticable, to ascertain the opinions of the ancient Fathers upon the matters of controversy between Protestants and Romanists, seeing that there is very little extant of the writings of the first three centuries:-that the writings extant treat of other matters: that many of them are forged, supposititious, or of later date :-that those which are considered authentic have been corrupted by time, ignorance, malice, or pious fraud:-that they are difficult to be understood, on account of the languages and idioms which the Fathers employed, and their rhetorical flourishes and logical subtleties:-that the writers often conceal their private opinions, and say what they did not believe; either in reporting the opinions of others; or disputing with an adversary, against whom they make use of whatever they are able; or accommodating themselves to their auditory :—that the same Father did not always throughout life hold the same doctrine; so that his pages are at variance with each other:that it is necessary, but difficult, to discover what they hold as certain, what as probable, and the degrees of their belief that we ought, if tradition is inade authoritative, to know the opinions, not only of one or more of the Fathers, but of the whole ancient church, which it is very difficult to discover:-that we ought to

:

know whether an opinion was held by the church universal, or only by some portion of it :—that it is impossible to know exactly what was the belief of the ancient church, either universal or particular, as to any of the controverted points-that the testimonies given by the Fathers are not always true or certain :-that they acknowledge that they were not infallible: that they did not set up to be authorities, and that their writings abound in mistakes and oversights :-that they erred in divers points of religion, not only singly, but many of them together that they contradict each other-and that as both Protestants and Romanists reject such of their opinions as do not suit their taste, the pretence of their being authoritative judges is set aside.

:

Such are Daillé's averments; and though in his treatise some things are overstrained, and others are not sequent, it is impossible not to admit that he has for the most part overwhelmingly proved what he asserts. Nor need we as sound Anglicans fear the issue, on the ground that Daillé was a Presbyterian; for though the Reformers and many other divines of the Church of England refer to the Fathers in their controversies with the Romanists, more perhaps than non-episcopal Protestants are wont to do; and though also in our discussions with the latter, the records of the early church stand us in good stead, as testimony to facts; do not set up the Fathers as authorities, any more than they do. We indeed go a step beyond Daillé; as for example where he says, "I confess that some of the early Protestant writers, as Bucer, Peter Martyr, and Jewell of Salisbury, and in a manner all the later ones, allege the testimony of the Fathers; but it is

we

only by way of confutation, and not of establishing anything; they do it only to overthrow the opinions of the Church of Rome, and not to strengthen their own." We go a step further; for Anglicans do use the testimony of the ancient church to "establish " and "strengthen" many opinions"-as for instance the propriety of baptism, the observance of the Lord's-day, and Episcopacy as opposed to Presbyterianism. We cannot indeed use it to rebut one opinion without so far aiding another. But as we use it only for testimony, not authority; not making it, as the Romanists do, a concurrent rule of faith with Scripture, but asserting, as much as the French Protestant Church, to which Daillé belonged, that inspired writ is the sole rule; there is no essential difference of opinion among true Protestants upon the subject; but all are opposed to the doctrine of Rome. And indeed Daillé himself frequently refers to the Fathers in the same manner as sound Anglicans do. Thus he remarks, in the opening sentence of his preface, that "The fundamentals of religion are both clearly delivered in Scripture and expressly admitted by the ancient councils and Fathers;" and he says (Book II. c. 2.) that "the Apostles' creed, and the determinations of the first four general councils, are assented to and approved by all the Protestant party;" so that, after all that has been said of late of the reverence of the Church of England for the first four general councils, her "assent and approval" is only in common with that of "all the Protestant party." Not that the alleged consent is so great a matter; for the Act referred to of the first of Elizabeth, (anno 1558) only says that the queen's commissioners should not condemn as heresy

anything that had not been so adjudged "by the authority of the canonical Scriptures, or by the first four general councils, or any of them, or by any other general council, wherein the same was declared heresy by the express and plain words of canonical Scripture." In this injunction there was no declaration that the decrees of councils are authoritative; on the contrary, Scripture is made the sole standard, and the decisions of councils are to be tried by it; all that is intimated of the first four being that they had been thus tested, so far at least that they had not declared anything to be heresy which the Scripture had not condemned. The whole is merely a direction to the commissioners not to proceed against persons as heretics upon insufficient grounds; or, as Bishop Gibson says, "for every thing which the church of Rome thought fit to call heresy." The heresies condemned by the first four councils were acknowledged both by Papists and Protestants to be condemned by Scripture; so that there was here no difference of opinion; but in regard

to

all other matters, either Scripture must be adduced, or if the decisions of councils were alleged they must be shewn to be scriptural. So much for this oft-referred-to clause in an obsolete statute; for the provision which from the first was only a civil ordinance, unsupported by ecclesiastical authority, dropped by the suppression of the high-commission court; besides which, it was superseded by the Act of the 13th of Elizabeth, which sanctions the Thirty-nine Articles agreed upon in Convocation, and says nothing of the first four councils; though it recognizes the doctrine that general councils may err and have erred.

The declaration, so much relied on, of the Convocation of 1640, that Socinianism is a "damnable and cursed heresy, being a complication of many ancient heresies, condemned by the four first general councils, and contrarient to the Articles of religion now established in the Church of England," is still less to the purpose as an acknowledgment of the binding authority of those councils. It is merely a remark that the Socinian heresy was condemned by those councils as it is by the Anglican Articles; a truth which no man doubts; and it was condemned because it is unscriptural. But even if the words applied to the point at issue, the canons of this Convocation are not binding, for they were never confirmed or acknowledged either by the Church or State, but were repudiated by both.

We do not always concur with Bishop Warburton; but what he remarks of the Fathers, in speaking of Daillé's treatise, is, we fear, to a wide extent, too true. He says: "These men, by taking the Greek philosophers to their assistance, in explaining the nature and genius of the Gospel, had, unhappily, turned religion into an art; and their successors, the schoolmen, by framing a body of theology out of them, instead of searching for it from the Scriptures, soon after turned it into a trade." "When the avarice and ambition of the Romish clergy had, by working on the superstition and ignorance of the people, erected what they call their hierarchy, and digested an ecclesiastical policy on the ruins of Gospel liberty for the administration of it, they found nothing of such use for the support of this lordly system as the making the authority of the Fathers sacred and decisive. For having introduced numerous errors and

66

superstitions both in rites and doctrine, which the silence and the declaration of Scripture equally condemned, they were obliged to seal up those living oracles,and open this new warehouse of the dead. And it was no wonder if in that shoal of writers (as a poet of our own calls it) which the great drag-net of time hath inclosed, and brought down to us, under the name of Fathers, there should be some amongst them of a character suited to countenance any kind of folly or extravagance. The decisions of the Fathers, therefore, they thought fit to treat as laws, and to collect them into a kind of code under the title of The Sentences." Warburton goes on to say that as both Protestants and Papists appealed to the Fathers as decisive authority, the latter were enabled to support their credit against all the evidence of common sense and Sacred Scripture; til at length M. Daillé, an excellent writer among the reformed, observing that the controversy was likely to be endless; for though the great corruptions of Popery were later than the third, fourth, and fifth centuries, to which the appeal was usually made, yet the seeds of them being then sown, and beginning to pullulate, it was but too plain there was hold enough for a skilful debater to draw the Fathers to his own side, and make them water the sprouts they had been planting :-observing this, I say, he wisely projected to vary the method both of attack and defence; in order to which he composed a discourse on the true use of the Fathers, in which, with uncommon learning and strength of argument, he shewed that the Fathers were incompetent deciders of the controversy now on foot; since the points in question were not formed into articles till long after the ages in

which they lived." "This,"

66

adds the bishop, was bringing the Fathers from the bench to the table; degrading them from the rank of judges, into the class of simple evidence; in which too, they were not to speak, like Irish evidence, in every cause where they were wanted, but only to such matters as were agreed to be within their knowledge." Had he stopped here, continues Warburton, his book had been free from blame; but, at the same time, his purpose had in all likelihood proved very ineffectual; for the obliquity of old prejudices is not to be set straight by reducing it to that line of right, which barely restores it to integrity. He went much further; and by shewing occasionally that they were absurd interpreters of Holy Writ, bad reasoners in morals, and very loose evidence in facts, he seemed willing to have his readers infer, that even though they had been masters of the subject, yet these other defects would have rendered them very unqualified deciders."

The Bishop goes on to state, that the work produced powerful effects in England; the more learned amongst our nobility emancipating themselves from the general prejudice. But, still more he says, "it gave birth to the two best defences ever written on the two best subjects, religion and liberty, namely, Chillingworth's Religion of Protestants, and Bishop J. Taylor's Liberty of Prophesying." Daillé has been ever since the chief storehouse from which those who have denied the authority of the Fathers have taken their materials.

We turn to the next treatise on our list, Dr. Couard's Life of Christians during the first three centuries, translated by Mr. Bernays, as an alleviation after the

foregoing strictures upon holy men, whose failings it is painful to notice, and which those who have entered into their labours ought rather to veil than expose, did not the claim set up on their behalf, of being infallible authori. ties, render the exposition necessary. Far more grateful is it with Dr. Couard to contemplate their life of love; their zeal in prayer; their serious view of their holy calling; their deadness to the world; their constancy under persecution; their public worship; their holy seasons; and their civil, social, and domestic life. The translation of Dr. Couard's discourses forms recent number of the "Biblical Cabinet," a work which we have several times taken occasion to notice, as containing, in a cheap and accessible form, in the English tongue, many valuable treatises of hermeneutical, exegetical, and philological theology. Dr. Couard, however, is not blind to the failings of the Fathers, but he contends for the purity, to a considerable degree, of the three centuries comprehended in his range; as for example in the following instance.

a

"Distinct from the baptismal vow, was the so called exorcism or formula of the expulsion of the evil spirit, which was pronounced over the person to be baptized. We find the first certain traces of this no earlier than the second half of the third century, when the desire for that which was external, and gratifying the senses, and love for empty ceremony, was daily increasing and becoming more prevalent in the ordinances of religion. They imagined that unbelievers were really and actually possessed by the evil spirit, and applied to the baptism of all heathens, as though the evil spirit dwelt in them bodily, the formula of exorcism which they were accustomed to use over those who were called demoniacs, or possessed. Neither the Scriptures, nor the early church, knew any thing of such notions; and we have therefore rightly given up this formula of exorcism at the baptism of our children, and use at this sacrament

no other formula than that which the

Lord himself has commanded.”

Mr. Bowdler's pamphlet, which follows next on our list, illustrates our remark as to the re-action which may be expected from The exaggerated statements. author, we need scarcely say, is not "an irreverent dissenter," as Froude flippantly and falsely called Jewell, but a man whose name, and that of several of his amiable, well-gifted, and devout relatives, is honourably known in connexion with church publications and church institutions.

The late benevolent Mr. Thomas Bowdler was regarded as a model of an orthodox layman; zealous for the church and its ordinances; and opposed to what were then considered innovating societies and practices. He published several works (not theological,) his last being characteristically devoted to providing church accommodation for the poor at Swansea. His sister, Miss H. Bowdler, was still more extensively known as the biographer of Elizabeth Smith, and the writer of several publications, particularly her popular

"Sermons on the Doctrines and Duties of Christianity;" which being published anonymously, Bishop Porteus, taking them for the composition of a clergyman, is said to have written to the bookseller, to offer the author a benefice. Of the sons of Mr. Bowdler, John, our old correspondent, whose writings were posthumously collected and published in two volumes, was among the most highly-gifted and esteemed

young men of his age; but his early death was not premature, so early and blessed was his preparation. The Rev. T. Bowdler, Rector of Sydenham, another brother, has published "Sermons on the nature, offices, and character of Jesus Christ;"