he production of relics,
extravagance in praising celibacy, formality in fasting; and such errors
would justify a protest, which the Catholic Fathers themselves are not
slow to make; but they would not justify that utter reprobation of
relics, of celibacy, and of fasting, of episcopacy, of prayers for the
dead, and of the doctrine of defectibility, which these men
avowed--avowed without the warrant of the first ages--on grounds of
private reason, under the influence of personal feeling, and with the
accompaniment of but a suspicious orthodoxy. It does certainly look as
if our search after Protestantism in Antiquity would turn out a simple
failure;--whatever Primitive Christianity was or was not, it was not the
religion of Luther. I shall think so, until I find Ignatius and Aerius,
in spite of their differences about bishops, agreeing in his doctrine of
justification; until Irenaeus and Jovinian, though at daggers drawn about
baptism, shall yet declare Scripture to be the sole rule of faith; until
Cyprian and Vigilantius, however at variance about the merit of
virginity, uphold in common the sacred right and duty of private
judgment.

CHAPTER V.

AND WHAT DO THE APOSTOLICAL CANONS SAY?

1.

Such, then, is the testimony borne in various ways by Origen, Eusebius,
and Cyril, by Aerius, Jovinian, and Vigilantius, to the immemorial
reception among Christians of those doctrines and practices which the
private judgment of this age considers to be unscriptural. I have been
going about from one page to another of the records of those early
times, prying and extravagating beyond the beaten paths of orthodoxy,
for the chance of detecting some sort of testimony in favour of our
opponents. With this object I have fallen upon the writers aforesaid;
and, since they have been more or less accused of heterodoxy, I thought
there was at least a chance of their subserving the cause of
Protestantism, which the Catholic Fathers certainly do not subserve; but
they, though differing from each other most materially, and some of them
differing from the Church, do not any one of them approximate to the
tone or language of the movement of 1517. Every additional instance of
this kind does but go indirectly to corroborate the testimony of the
Catholic Church.

It is natural and becoming in all of us to make a brave struggle for
life; but I do not think it will avail the Protestant who attempts it in
the medium of ecclesiastical history