tion? Antecedent difficulty in the question there is
none; or rather, the probability is in favour of there being some
necessary doctrine, from the analogy of the other parts of religion. The
question is simply about the matter of fact.

This analogy is perspicuously expressed in one of the sermons of St.
Leo:--"Not only," he says, "in the exercise of virtue and the observance
of the commandments, but also in the path of faith, strait and difficult
is the way which leads to life; and it requires great pains, and
involves great risks, to walk without stumbling along the one footway of
sound doctrine, amid the uncertain opinions and the plausible untruths
of the unskilful, and to escape all peril of mistake when the toils of
error are on every side."--_Serm._ 25.

St. Gregory Nazianzen says the same thing:--"We have bid farewell to
contentious deviations of doctrine, and compensations on either side,
neither Sabellianizing nor Arianizing. These are the sports of the evil
one, who is a bad arbiter of our matters. But we, pacing along the
middle and royal way, _in which also the essence of the virtues lies_,
in the judgment of the learned, believe in Father, Son, and Holy
Ghost."--_Orat._ 32.

On the whole, then, I see nothing very strange either in orthodoxy
lying in what at first sight appears like subtle and minute exactness of
doctrine, or in its being our duty to contend even to confessorship for
such exactness. Whether it be thus exact, and whether the exactness of
Ambrose, Leo, or Gregory be the true and revealed exactness, is quite
another question: all I say is, that it is no great difficulty to
believe that it may be what they say it is, both as to its truth and as
to its importance.

3.

But now supposing the question is asked, are Ambrose, Leo, and Gregory
right? and is our Church right in maintaining with them the Athanasian
doctrine on those sacred points to which it relates, and condemning
those who hold otherwise? what answer is to be given? I answer by asking
in turn, supposing any one inquired how we know that Ambrose, Leo, or
Gregory was right and our Church right, in receiving St. Paul's
Epistles, what answer we should make? The answer would be, that it is a
matter of history that the Apostle wrote those letters which are
ascribed to him. And what is meant by its being a matter of history?
why, that it has ever been so believed, so declared, so recorded, so
acted on, from the first down to this d