ics.[189] If it was desired to get rid of
these, an effort was made to impute to them some deviation from the rule
of faith; and under this pretext the Church freed herself from the
Montanists and the Monarchians.[190] Cyprian was the first to proclaim
the identity of heretics and schismatics, by making a man's Christianity
depend on his belonging to the great episcopal Church
confederation.[191] But, both in East and West, this theory of his
became established only by very imperceptible degrees, and indeed,
strictly speaking, the process was never completed at all. The
distinction between heretics and schismatics was preserved, because it
prevented a public denial of the old principles, because it was
advisable on political grounds to treat certain schismatic communities
with indulgence, and because it was always possible in case of need to
prove heresy against the schismatics.[192]

_Addendum III._--As soon as the empiric Church ruled by the bishops was
proclaimed to be the foundation of the Christian religion, we have the
fundamental premises for the conception that everything progressively
adopted by the Church, all her functions, institutions, and liturgy, in
short, all her continuously changing arrangements were holy and
apostolic. But the courage to draw all the conclusions here was
restrained by the fact that certain portions of tradition, such as the
New Testament canon of Scripture and the apostolic doctrine, had been
once for all exalted to an unapproachable height. Hence it was only with
slowness and hesitation that Christians accepted the inferences from the
idea of the Church in the remaining directions, and these conclusions
always continued to be hampered with some degree of uncertainty. The
idea of the [Greek: paradosis agraphos]; (unwritten tradition); i.e.,
that every custom, however recent, within the sphere of outward
regulations, of public worship, discipline, etc., is as holy and
apostolic as the Bible and the "faith", never succeeded in gaining
complete acceptance. In this case, complicated, uncertain, and
indistinct assumptions were the result.

Footnotes:

[Footnote 20: In itself the predicate "Catholic" contains no element
that signifies a secularising of the Church. "Catholic" originally means
Christianity in its totality as contrasted with single congregations.
Hence the concepts "all communities" and the "universal Church" are
identical. But from the beginning there was a dogmatic elem