ncient saint, who
was generally opposed to the authority of the Roman See, had they belonged
to a Patriarch of Antioch, or Constantinople, jealous of his own rights,
they would surely have had their weight, as testimonies to a fact, not mere
opinions of the speaker. They would have borne witness to no such thing as
they reprobate having, till then, been allowed or thought of. Or, had they
been isolated statements, not borne out by contemporaneous or antecedent
documents, but standing alone, uncontradicted indeed, but unsupported, they
would still have told. How, then, are we to express their weight, or the
full assurance of faith which they give us, as being the deliberate,
oft-repeated, official statements of a Pope, than whom there never was one
more vigorous in defending or in exercising the rights of his See? As being
supported and borne out, and in every possible way corroborated by the
facts of history, the decrees of Councils, the innumerable testimonies of
all parts of the world, the everyday life of the living, breathing Church
for six hundred years? In an early work, Mr. Newman had said, "What there
is not the shadow of a reason for saying that the Fathers held, what has
not the faintest pretensions of being a Catholic Truth, is this, that St.
Peter, and his successors, were and are universal Bishops; that they have
the whole of Christendom for their own diocese, in a way in which other
Apostles and Bishops had and have not."

In his last work he has retracted, saying, "Most true, if, in order that a
doctrine be considered Catholic, it must be formally stated by the Fathers
generally from the very first: but, on the same understanding, the doctrine
also of the Apostolic succession in the Episcopal order has not the
faintest pretensions of being a Catholic truth."[146]

Now these words of Mr. Newman seem to imply that the expressions of
Fathers, or the decrees of Councils, look towards this presumed Catholic
truth, tend to it, and finally admit it, as a truth which they had been all
along implicitly holding, or unconsciously living upon, and at last
recognised and expressed. On the contrary, to my apprehension, they hold
another view about the See of Rome, and express it again and again. It is
not a point on which there is variation or inconsistency among them. I have
as clear a conviction as one can well have that St. Augustine did _not_
hold the Papal theory. I think the words that I have quoted from him prove