d witness, in addition to
their recognition by the first centuries, in evidence of their
Apostolical origin. Those first centuries observe them; contemporary
heretics respect them; only later and corrupt times pass them by. May
they not be taken as a fair portrait, as far as they go, of the
doctrines and customs of Primitive Christianity?

8.

I do wish out-and-out Protestants would seriously lay to heart where
they stand when they would write a history of Christianity. Are there
any traces of Luther before Luther? Is there anything to show that what
they call the religion of the Bible was ever professed by any persons,
Christians, Jews, or heathen? Again, are there any traces in history of
a process of change in Christian belief and practice, so serious, or so
violent, as to answer to the notion of a great corruption or perversion
of the Primitive Religion? Was there ever a time, what was the time,
when Christianity was not that which Protestants protest against, as if
formal, unspiritual, self-righteous, superstitious, and unevangelic? If
that time cannot be pointed out, is not "the Religion of Protestants" a
matter, not of past historical fact, but of modern private judgment?
Have they anything to say in defence of their idea of the Christianity
of the first centuries, except that that view of it is necessary to
their being Protestants. "Christians," they seem to say, "_must_ have
been in those early times different from what the record of those times
shows them to have been, and they must, as time went on, have fallen
from that faith and that worship which they had at first, though history
is quite silent on the subject, _or else_ Protestantism, which is the
apple of our eye, is not true. We are driven to hypothetical facts, or
else we cannot reconcile with each other phenomena so discordant as
those which are presented by ancient times and our own. We claim to
substitute _a priori_ reasoning for historical investigation, by the
right of self-defence and the duty of self-preservation."

I have urged this point in various ways, and now I am showing the light
which the Canons of the Apostles throw upon it. There is no reasonable
doubt that they represent to us, on the whole, and as far as they go,
the outward face of Christianity in the first centuries;--now will the
Protestant venture to say that he recognizes in it any likeness of his
own Religion? First, let him consider what is conveyed in the very idea
of Ec