nder
circumstances, admits of dispensation. Or again, it has, for instance,
in this day been debated whether the sanctification of the Lord's-day is
a divine or an ecclesiastical appointment. Dionysius, then, in the above
extract, means nothing more than to deny that the Apostles enacted these
Canons; or, again, that they enacted them _as_ Apostles; and he goes on
to say that the Popes had acknowledged the _ecclesiastical_ authority of
some of them by embodying them in their decrees. At the same time, his
language certainly seems to show as much as this, and it is confirmed by
that of other writers, that the Latin Church, though using them
separately as authority, did not receive them as a Collection with the
implicit deference which they met with in the East; indeed, the last
thirty-five, though two of them were cited at Nicaea, and one at
Constantinople, A.D. 394, seem to have been in inferior account. The
Canons of the General Councils took their place, and the Decrees of the
Popes.

6.

This, then, seems to be the state of the case as regards the Collection
or Edition of Canons, whether fifty or eighty-five, which is under
consideration. Speaking, not of the Canons themselves, but of this
particular edition of them, I thus conclude about it--that, whether it
was made at the end of the third century, or later, there is no
sufficient proof that it was strictly of authority; but that it is not
very material that it should be proved to be of authority, nay, or even
to have been made in early times. Give us the Canons themselves, and we
shall be able to prove the point for which I am adducing them, even
though they were not at first formed into a collection. They are, one by
one, witnesses to us of a state of things.

Indeed, it must be confessed, that probability is against this
Collection having ever been regarded as an authority by the ancient
Church. It was an _anonymous_ Collection; and, as being anonymous,
seemed to have no claim upon Christians. They would consider that a
collection or body of Canons could only be imposed by a _Council_; and
since the Council could not be produced which imposed this in
particular, they had no reason to admit it. They might have been in the
practice of acting upon this Canon, and that, and the third, and so on
to the eighty-fifth, from time immemorial, and that as Canons, not as
mere customs, and might confess the obligation of each: and yet might
say, "We never looked upon t