m confessed that from time immemorial it
had been guided by certain ecclesiastical rules, which it considered of
authority, which it did not ascribe to any particular persons or synods
(a sign of great antiquity), and which writers of the day assigned to
the Apostles. I suppose we know pretty well, at this day, what the
customs of our Church have been since James the First's time, or since
the Reformation; and if respectable writers at present were to state
some of them,--for instance, that it is and has been the rule of our
Church that the king should name the bishops, that Convocation should
not sit without his leave, or that Easter should be kept according to
the Roman rule,--we should think foreigners very unreasonable who
doubted their word. Now, in the case before us, we find the Church
Catholic, the first time it had ever met together since the Apostles'
days, speaking as a matter of course of the rules to which it had ever
been accustomed to defer.

If we knew no more than this, and did not know what the rules were; or
if, knowing what they were, we yet decided, as we well might, that the
particular rules are not of continual obligation; still, the very
circumstance that there _were_ rules from time immemorial would be a
great fact in the history of Christianity. But we do know, from the
works of the Fathers, the _subjects_ of these Canons, and that to the
number of thirty or forty of them; so that we might form a code, as far
as it goes, of primitive discipline, quite independent of the particular
Collection which is under discussion. However, it is remarkable that all
of these thirty or forty are found in this Collection, being altogether
nearly half the whole number, so that the only question is, whether the
rest are of that value which we know belongs to a great proportion of
them. It is worth noticing, that _no_ Ecclesiastical Canon is mentioned
in the historical documents of the primitive era which is not found in
this Collection, for it shows that, whoever compiled it, the work was
done with considerable care. The opponents to its genuineness bring,
indeed, several exceptions, as they wish to consider them; but these
admit of so satisfactory an explanation as to illustrate the proverb,
that _exceptio probat regulam_.

Before going on to consider the whole Collection, let us see in what
terms the ancient writers speak of those particular Canons to which they
actually refer.

(1.) Athanasius speaks as fo