. He will find himself in an element
in which he cannot breathe. The problem before him is to draw a line
between the periods of purity and alleged corruption, such, as to have
all the Apostles on one side, and all the Fathers on the other; which
may insinuate and meander through the dove-tailings and inosculations of
historical facts, and cut clean between St. John and St Ignatius, St.
Paul and St. Clement; to take up a position within the shelter of the
book of Acts, yet safe from the range of all other extant documents
besides, And at any rate, whether he succeeds or not, so much he must
grant, that if such a system of doctrine as he would now introduce ever
existed in early times, it has been clean swept away as if by a deluge,
suddenly, silently, and without memorial; by a deluge coming in a night,
and utterly soaking, rotting, heaving up, and hurrying off every vestige
of what it found in the Church, before cock-crowing; so that "when they
rose in the morning" her true seed "were all dead corpses"--nay, dead
and buried--and without grave-stone. "The waters went over them; there
was not one of them left; they sunk like lead in the mighty waters."
Strange antitype, indeed, to the early fortunes of Israel!--then the
enemy was drowned, and "Israel saw them dead upon the sea-shore." But
now, it would seem, water proceeded as a flood "out of the serpent's
mouth," and covered all the witnesses, so that not even their dead
bodies "lay in the streets of the great city." Let him take which of his
doctrines he will,--his peculiar view of self-righteousness, of
formality, of superstition; his notion of faith, or of spirituality in
religious worship; his denial of the virtue of the sacraments, or of the
ministerial commission, or of the visible Church; or his doctrine of the
divine efficacy of the Scriptures as the one appointed instrument of
religious teaching; and let him consider how far Antiquity, as it has
come down to us, will countenance him in it. No; he must allow that the
alleged deluge has done its work; yes, and has in turn disappeared
itself; it has been swallowed up in the earth, mercilessly as itself was
merciless.

2.

Representations such as these have been met by saying that the extant
records of Primitive Christianity are scanty, and that, _for what we
know_, what is not extant, had it survived, would have told a different
tale. But the hypothesis that history _might_ contain facts which it
does _not_ co