t intellects,
Origen, Tertullian, and Eusebius, were representatives of a philosophy
not hers; her greatest bishops, such as St. Gregory, St. Dionysius, and
St Cyprian, so little exercised a doctor's office, as to incur, however
undeservedly, the imputation of doctrinal inaccuracy. Vigilant as was
the Holy See then, as in every age, yet there is no Pope, I may say,
during that period, who has impressed his character upon his generation;
yet how well instructed, how precisely informed, how self-possessed an
oracle of truth, nevertheless, do we find the Church to be, when the
great internal troubles of the fourth century required it! how
unambiguous, how bold is the Christianity of the great Pontiffs, St.
Julius, St. Damasus, St. Siricius, and St. Innocent; of the great
Doctors, St. Athanasius; St. Basil, St. Ambrose, and St. Augustine! By
what channels, then, had the divine philosophy descended down from the
Great Teacher through three centuries of persecution? First through the
See and Church of Peter, into which error never intruded (though Popes
might be little more than victims, to be hunted out and killed, as soon
as made), and to which the faithful from all quarters of the world might
have recourse when difficulties arose, or when false teachers anywhere
exalted themselves. But intercommunion was difficult, and comparatively
rare in days like those, and of nothing is there less pretence of proof
than that the Holy See, while persecution raged, imposed a faith upon
the ecumenical body. Rather, in that earliest age, it was simply the
living spirit of the myriads of the faithful, none of them known to
fame, who received from the disciples of our Lord, and husbanded so
well, and circulated so widely, and transmitted so faithfully,
generation after generation, the once delivered apostolic faith; who
held it with such sharpness of outline and explicitness of detail, as
enabled even the unlearned instinctively to discriminate between truth
and error, spontaneously to reject the very shadow of heresy, and to be
proof against the fascination of the most brilliant intellects, when
they would lead them out of the narrow way. Here, then, is a luminous
instance of what I mean by an energetic action from within.

Take again the history of the Saracenic schools and parties, on which I
have already touched. Mr. Southgate considers the absence of religious
controversy among the Turks, contrasted with its frequency of old among
the