o apply their bare letter to a state of things
totally changed? or to consider expressions proving the _primacy_ of Rome,
as claimed in the fourth century, to prove equally a _supremacy_ as claimed
in the nineteenth, which is as different from the former as one thing can
well be from another. This very St. Meletius, a man of pre-eminent sanctity
of life, the ordainer of St. Chrysostom, dies, it would appear, out of
communion with Rome, and has ever been accounted a saint in the Western as
well as in the Eastern Church.

But to recur to the point of jurisdiction at the time of the Nicene
Council. It is beyond question, both from the acts of that Council, and
from the Apostolic Canons, which represent the Eastern Church in the second
and third centuries, that, whatever the pre-eminence of Rome might consist
in, there was no claim whatever to confer jurisdiction on Bishops out of
the Roman Patriarchate, then comprising Italy, south of Milan, and Sicily.
Even differences, any where arising, were to be settled in Provincial
Councils. "It is necessary to know, that, up to the Council of Nicea, all
ecclesiastical affairs had been terminated in the Councils of each
Province; and there had been but very few occasions in which it had been
necessary to convoke an assembly of several Provinces. The Council of
Nicea, even, only speaks of Provincial Councils, and orders that all things
should be settled therein."[14] The testimony and conduct of St. Cyprian
will illustrate the Roman Primacy, to which Mr. Newman claims him as a
witness. And such he is beyond doubt. In his fifty-fifth letter, which
begins, "Cyprian to his brother Cornelius, greeting;" he complains bitterly
to that Pope that Felicissimus and his party "dare to set sail, and to
carry a letter from schismatical and profane persons to the see of Peter,
and to the principal Church, whence the unity of the priesthood took its
rise; nor consider that they are the Romans whose faith had been praised by
the preaching of the Apostle, to whom faithlessness can have no access."
This Mr. Newman considers a pretty strong testimony in his "cumulative
argument" for the authority of Rome. It would be as well, however, to go on
a little further, and see what was the cause of St. Cyprian's vehement
indignation. It was, that Felicissimus ventured _to appeal to Pope
Cornelius_, when his cause had already been heard and settled by St.
Cyprian, at Carthage. "But what was the cause of their com