tive face of the Church. To this
I appeal. Certainly, the more ancient historians, whom our
adversaries also habitually, consult, are enumerated pretty well
as follows: Eusebius, Damasus, Jerome, Rufinus, Orosius,
Socrates, Sozomen, Theodoret Cassiodorus, Gregory of Tours,
Usuard, Regino, Marianus, Sigebert, Zonaras, Cedrinus,
Nicephorus. What have they to tell? The praises of our religion,
its progress, vicissitudes, enemies. Nay, and this is a point I
would have you observe diligently, they who in deadly hatred
dissent from us,--Melancthon, Pantaleon, Funck, the Centuriators
of Magdeburg,--on applying themselves to write either the
chronology or the history of the Church, if they did not get
together the exploits of our heroes, and heap up the accounts of
the frauds and crimes of the enemies of our Church, would pass by
fifteen hundred years with no story to tell.

Along with the above-mentioned consider the local historians, who
have searched with laborious curiosity into the transactions of
some one particular nation. These men, wishing by all means to
enrich and adorn the Sparta which they had gotten for their own,
and to that effect not passing over in silence even such things
as banquets of unusual splendour, or sleeved tunics, or hilts of
daggers, or gilt spurs, and other such minutiae having any smack
of revelry about them, surely, if they had heard of any change in
religion, or any falling off from the standard of early ages,
would have related it, many of them; or, if not many, at least
several; if not several, some one anyhow. Not one, well-disposed
or ill-disposed towards us, has related anything of the sort, or
even dropped the slightest hint of the same.

For example. Our adversaries grant us,--they cannot do
otherwise,--that the Roman Church was at one time holy,
Catholic, Apostolic, at the time when it deserved these
eulogiums from St. Paul: _Your faith is spoken of in the whole
world. Without ceasing I make a commemoration of you. I know
that when I come to you, I shall come in the abundance of the
blessing of Christ. All the Churches of Christ salute you. Your
obedience is published in every place_ (Rom. i. 8, 9; xv. 29;
xvi. 17, 19): at the time when Paul, being kept there in free
custody, was spreading the gospel (Acts xxviii. 31) : at the
time when Peter once in that city was ruling _the Church
gathered at Babylon_ (1 Peter v. 13): at the time when that
Clement, so singularly praised by the Ap